NumberSyllableSystem

How?

This is my own system, devised following the principles of pronounceable-nonsense password generators. Each digit is assigned a unique consonant and arbitrary vowel. Together these form syllables which make the number pronounceable. There were enough unique and distinct consonants in the English orthography to encode number bases up to hexadecimal.

The syllables are:

Memorize the syllable as the actual pronunciation of the digit. That is, learn to read 1 as "ri", 2 as "to", etc. These are digits, not whole numbers, so fifteen is "totototo" in binary, "topi" in base ten and "jo" in hexadecimal.

Example: the first few digits of pi are:

now chunk that into pseudo words:

Voila, memorable.

Why?

I thought it would be good if a way could be made to manipulate numbers as if they were words, because people are so much better at memorizing words than numbers. By allowing the numbers to be simple syllables, nonsense words can be built up after the manner of a "pronounceable password generator".

I chose to use unique consonants because they seem to be the most important part of language (compare the number of written languages that omit vowels entirely). I also chose to sort them by usage frequency so that low bases get progressively "easier".

For the ordering I used the Letter Frequency in the English Language (18584 Common Base Words) list which is

eliminated vowels, eliminated consonants "cywxq" as being either redundant, confusable with vowels, or prone to create unpronounceable words This gave me my base consonants to form the syllables. I then added vowels arbitrarily according to aesthetic preference, avoiding e because of the way English orthography uses it as a sound modifier.

-- Julian Morrison <julian.morrison@gmail.com>