glossa

Your own constructed language, in the terminal. Encoding runs three stages:

1. Word substitution — every word is swapped for an invented one (coined on first sight, remembered forever).
2. Word order shift — the sentence is re-ordered by a reversible rule.
3. Invented alphabet — the result is written in a 26-symbol script of its own.

Decoding runs the exact inverse, so text survives a round trip — punctuation, capitalisation, numbers, and line breaks included.

$ glossa -code "Hello John, I eat bread!"
ⵈⵅⴷⴹⵖⴹ ⵁⵋⴽⵋ ◆ⵃⵅⵒⵂ ◆ⴵⴾⵔⵅ, ◆ⴴⵅⴷⵋⵊⴹⵃ!

$ glossa -code "Hello John, I eat bread!" | glossa -decode
Hello John, I eat bread!

Install

pip install glossa-lang

The distribution is named glossa-lang (the name glossa was already taken on PyPI); the command it installs is glossa.

From a checkout instead:

cd glossa && python3 -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -e ".[dev]"
ln -sf "$PWD/.venv/bin/glossa" ~/.local/bin/glossa

Commands

Text can come from arguments, -f FILE, or a pipe:

cat notes.txt | glossa -code

Word order rules

glossa config set order <rule> — every rule is exactly reversible.

• reverse (default) — i eat bread → bread eat i
• rotate — last word to the front: i eat bread → bread i eat
• pairs — swap neighbours: a b c d → b a d c
• none — keep the original order

Memory files

Everything lives in ~/.glossa (override with GLOSSA_HOME or --home DIR):

Words are coined deterministically from the seed, so the same seed always invents the same word for the same source word.

Notes

• Capitalisation is carried by a mark in front of the word: ◆ = first letter, ◈ = all caps.
• Unknown words come back unchanged on decode, with a warning on stderr.
• --no-new-words encodes without inventing anything new.

Tests

.venv/bin/python -m pytest --cov --cov-report=term-missing