''Lontara Bilang-bilang'' is a

cipher In cryptography, a cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption—a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is ''encipherment''. To encipher or encode i ...

of the

Lontara script The Lontara script (), also known as the Bugis script, Bugis-Makassar script, or Urupu Sulapa’ Eppa’ "four-cornered letters", is one of Indonesia's traditional scripts developed in the South Sulawesi region. The script is primarily used to ...

, currently used for Buginese poetry. This script uses the

Eastern Arabic numerals The Eastern Arabic numerals, also called Arabic-Hindu numerals or Indo–Arabic numerals, are the symbols used to represent numerical digits in conjunction with the Arabic alphabet in the countries of the Mashriq (the east of the Arab world), ...

-inspired letterform to substitute the Lontara script, as a way to hide it to the Dutch at the time. It was an adaptation to a similar ciphers of the Arabic script that has been used in South Asia around the 19th century.

Usage

In Buginese literature, ''Lontara Bilang-bilang'' is sometimes used as a substitute to

in writing ''basa to bakke','' a play-on-words, as well as ''élong maliung bettuanna'', poetry with some hidden meaning using ''basa to bakke'.'' In this script, each base letter in standard Lontara are substituted with forms derived from Arabic script and its numerals, with standard, unchanged Lontara vowel diacritics attached to them.

Cipher system

Lontara Bilang-Bilang substitutes Arabic letters with stylized

numerals A numeral is a figure, symbol, or group of figures or symbols denoting a number. It may refer to: * Numeral system used in mathematics * Numeral (linguistics), a part of speech denoting numbers (e.g. ''one'' and ''first'' in English) * Numerical ...

in accordance with

Abjad numerals The Abjad numerals, also called Hisab al-Jummal ( ar, حِسَاب ٱلْجُمَّل, ), are a decimal alphabetic numeral system/ alphanumeric code, in which the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet are assigned numerical values. They have been ...

, a system that has been used in 19 AD in what is now

Pakistan Pakistan ( ur, ), officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ( ur, , label=none), is a country in South Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, fifth-most populous country, with a population of almost 24 ...

and

Afghanistan Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,; prs, امارت اسلامی افغانستان is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. Referred to as the Heart of Asia, it is bord ...

. In Bilang-Bilang, many letters for Arabic sounds not in Buginese are not used, while for sounds existing in Buginese and

Malay Malay may refer to: Languages * Malay language or Bahasa Melayu, a major Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore ** History of the Malay language, the Malay language from the 4th to the 14th century ** Indonesi ...

, new letters are added with more stylization. For example, ب have a numeral value of 2 and therefore is substituted by a stylized form of ٢, illustrated as follows: Jawi letters for

and Buginese sounds are formed with dots as equivalent for its Arabic counterpart. For example. ج (jim) uses the form of ٣, while چ (ca) uses the form of ٣ as well but with the addition of three dots, illustrated as follows: Pre-nasal sounds are formed with the addition of a diacritic line, illustrated as follows:

Letterform Table

Unicode

The Lontara Bilang-bilang Script has not yet been added into the

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

standard as of version 14.0. A code range has been assigned for it in the

Supplementary Multilingual Plane In the Unicode standard, a plane is a continuous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00–1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadecimal ...

, but as of revision 14.0.0, no proposals has been made for assigning the letters.

Example text

References