Letters and Empires: The Natopabet Book

[Nathan]

The Natopabet is perhaps the oldest cultural item Natopia has, however it is the least used and least known cultural relic. Old Natopian was first constructed in the fall of 2002, months after the founding of Natopia as a city and perhaps mere weeks after the Reorganizations into a micronation. Old Natopian is characterized by a simple principle: negative letters. Using the Latin alphabet, the Natopabet's creator simply joined the unconnected ends of letters, and erased the remainder of the letter. This left the "negative" of a letter. At first glance, Old Natopian was gibberish, yet once told the "secret" it was easily read with some concentration and imagination. The main drawback to Old Natopian was that each letter required twice, sometimes three times, the pencil strokes to write it, making writing inefficient and typing the alphabet was impossible.

However, in August of 2005, the Natopabet was almost rewritten totally. New Natopian is much more simplistic and easier to write. New Natopian is, with some effort, able to be typed on a standard keyboard allowing for generous uses of Alt codes and inserting characters manually. Each letter retains the integrity of its Old Natopian counterpart, yet is, in some cases, distinctly different. There are no cases in the Natopian Alphabet, all letters in Old Natopian were based off of the capital cases of Latin letters, so therefore, Natopian letters are capital case by default. There is no punctuation in the Natopabet, pauses (commas) and full stops (periods) are implied by the length of spacing between words. Questions are implied by wording and exclaimed sentences should be written without spacing. The Natopabet was designed to be a code for brief, sensitive messages, and thus very few public documents have been written with this alphabet.

A = џ
B = 3
C = ]
D = [
E = Э
F = ?
G = 7
H = -
I = _
J = U
K = ۷
L = Δ
M = w
N = v
O = :
P = *
Q = Ø
R = 2
S = Z
T = V
U = (
V = \
W = n
X = ^
Y = )
Z = S

Natopian numerals were also derived using the same technique used to create Old Natopian characters. These numerals have changed over time and are New Natopian numerals:

0 = <>
1 = L
2 = o
3 = Ξ
4 = Λ
5 = Γ
6 = b
7 = Ҹ
8 = Р
9 = p