h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Human readable (with practice), intended more to convey information than obfuscate it, designed primarily for compactness.

The basic idea is one symbol per word (case sensitive, anything that can be typed on a normal keyboard). There would also be escape characters (an escape character, followed by a letter standing for a category, followed by a letter standing for a member of that category (e.g., "*Cr" might mean the color (C) red (r), and "*Nt" could be the name of someone in an agreed-upon list, probably starting with T)), and modifiers (a certain symbol before an adjective would make it an adverb, another one before a verb would make it past tense, and so on). Symbol-to-meaning mapping should be as logical and intuitive as possible. For example, "@" should mean "at" and probably "to" as well, like the French "à". I also propose that "(" could mean "of" (as in "f(x)"...) and therefore ")", its reverse, should be read as a possessive ('s).

I'll probably be starting a guide entry to make it easier to collaborate on this, but I wanted to see how much interest there was in it first.

What's this for?

Fun, mostly.

And possibly getting around the per-word charge for ads in the school newspaper. But mostly just for fun.

FOR FUN !!

Seriously, if you do go ahead and create a guide entry, please try and explain things a bit more simply, for people like me.

Should be very intresting !

SNIDE B SCHEME

There is a system similar to this where everything is put into 26 main categories, labelled a-z, every sub category is a-z and so on.
It's been a while since I did any linguistics but here's a quick example

A dog is: living, an animal, a mammal, four legged, canine, domestic.

So, for the sake of the argument, if in the main categories animal is P, in the first row of sub-categories animal is M, under that; mammal is D, four legged is I, canine is R and domestic is Y - the word for dog, in this system, is PMDIRY.

It doesn't save you any letters at all but I was just trying to show a similar system. I can't remember the guy who came up with it.

Liam.

Liam,
I think you're possibly referring to a descendant of either:

a) The language developed by John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester as described in 'Essay Towards a Real Character and Philosophic Language' (London, 1688)
b) Awato, created by the American Stephen Pearl Andrews and described in 'The Basic Outline of Universology' (1872)

(Though words in the latter does seem to be mainly consonant-vowel pairs.)