[cjhveal]

I found it pretty curious that the voiced dental fricative was used to represent 1 but the unvoiced dental fricative was used to represent 8, seems like the only voiced/unvoiced pair to be split in this way.

In my idiolect, they both belong together with the alveolar plosive pair (/t/,/d/) in category 1. The place of articulation feels almost identical between my laminal plosives and dental fricatives.

Though I do agree with grouping the velar nasal along with the alveolar nasal rather than with the other velar plosives. The acoustic similarity between /n/ and /N/ feels a lot more salient than any similarity in velar articulation.

Overall, a really cool system! Now I'm curious about what kind of density you could reasonably encode if you remove the need to memorize and used it as a form of steganography.

[krisfris]

You're right that the voiced and unvoiced pair ð and θ probably belong together, as is the case with other voiced and unvoiced pairs. This would also significantly reduce the disambiguities that need to be manually resolved in Step 3. I chose to put θ into category 8 though because intuitively it sounds more like f than t to me, possibly because I'm not a native speaker. I might change my mind about it if it turns out to be more practical to have them both in category 1.

I like your idea of using the major system as a form of steganography. It would require a deterministic encoding algorithm though. I might explore this idea in another post in the future.

[cjhveal]

I think these are cases where it's going to depend on what is most natural for each individual, especially when used for mnemonic purposes. Whether the acoustic or articulatory similarities feel more salient is going to depend entirely on your own mental model of the language. It's common to see the unvoiced dental fricative realized as /f/, even in native english dialects, so if that is more natural for you to remember, there's value in that.

[jackric]

Do you sell turboencabulators?