A Cipher Thought Experiment

[oshfdk]

trajan117, I am just curious why you chose to use the particular character set of G, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, /, +, and 4?

In creating a test cipher like this -- where the symbols are arbitrary -- it would be more natural to use the characters A through M, or something like that.

I don't know the right answer, but since there is nothing from trajan117 so far, here's what I think: I suspect the character set is a clever way of making the ciphertext look like a language of sorts. For this it's important that most combinations of characters look like something one can pronounce. L, M, N, R, S can easily combine with most other consonants to create pronounceable sequences. GLROPSTONMLKO could be a word, if a strange one, on the other hand BDCADEFDBC looks like an unpronounceable non-word sequence. If one takes A-M: ABCDEFGHIJKLM, then only L, M and F can seamlessly combine with other consonants. I'm not sure about the slash, but maybe it makes it visually easier to decode the cipher, given that it's quite easy for a human decoder to lose the track of code boundaries in longer words.

I'm not sure I'm right about this, because it would have been just as easy to make any of the basic code sequences a complete syllable (GO, RE, FI, TO, FAN, etc), but maybe this would make the way to split the ciphertext into codes too obvious.