Tauri

The chart

Columns are the consonant, set by the three vertical lines. Rows are the vowel, set by the three horizontals. The two diagonals carry tone — switch it below and the whole chart changes voice.

How to read one

• Left, centre, right is front, middle, back. The vertical you draw says where your mouth closes: left is labial m, centre coronal t, right velar k. Draw two and you get the blend — left+centre is p, all three is r, none at all opens on the vowel.
• Top, middle, bottom is high, mid, low. The horizontal says where your tongue sits: i, e, o. Combinations give u, ai, ao, au. No horizontal at all is the open default, a.
• The diagonals are movement, so they are tone. Rising, falling, or both at once for a dip. A diagonal is the only line that goes somewhere.
• The empty glyph is a. No line drawn, mouth open, no consonant and no tone — zero in binary, and the ground of the alphabet.

What makes it a language and not a cipher

• Nothing is assigned. There is no table mapping glyph 87 to a sound; the sound is read off the bits. Draw a glyph nobody has drawn before and it already has exactly one pronunciation, which anyone knowing the rule will arrive at independently.
• It is a bijection. 8 vowels × 8 consonants × 4 tones = 256 = 2⁸ exactly. Every glyph one sound, every sound one glyph, verified across all 256 both directions.
• Combination survives. Overlay two glyphs and the lines XOR; the four bands — ground, wind, form, change — XOR with them, because the band is the parity of each half. Composition needs no lookup either.
• Eight is counted, not chosen. A 3×3 cell has exactly three rows, three columns and two diagonals. There is no ninth line. Nothing finer than a full span can be drawn, which is the resolution limit the source glyphs obey.

Where this comes from, and what it is not

• Allyson Grey's Secret Writing. A script she began in the early 1970s after an LSD vision, twenty letters selected out of what she calls an infinite variety, their order fixed in 1975. phronesis began by studying her paintings.
• It is not a reading of hers. Her words: the letters are "untranslatable and unpronounceable", and her site says they avoid "any association with sound". She rules out both meaning and sound. Tauri takes the phenomenon she describes as widely seen — "reported by many psychonauts" — and not the alphabet she drew from it.
• The precedent. Xu Bing made Book from the Sky, four thousand characters nobody can read, then made Square Word Calligraphy, a separate system that reads. He did not go back and make the first one legible.
• What is honestly unknown. Whether the four orientations reflect the visual cortex's own bias, or merely the fact that a square has four. Cardinals outnumber obliques 3:1 here, which is the right direction — but an n×n grid forces that ratio, so it is not yet evidence.

Attribution

The lineage is Allyson Grey, whose life's subjects are Chaos, Order and Secret Writing. phronesis began in March 2026 by studying her paintings, and its habit of coining private vocabulary is inherited from that script.

Nothing of hers is reproduced here and nothing is decoded. Her position is explicit and covers both meaning and sound: the letters are "untranslatable and unpronounceable", and her site states they avoid "any association with sound." She also writes: "I intentionally avoided 'making up' meaning for the symbols. Assigned meaning would seem random, invented by my rational mind and not universal or authentic."

What Tauri takes is the phenomenon she describes as widely shared — "Secret writing has been reported by many psychonauts" — and not the alphabet she selected from it, which is twenty letters in an order she fixed in 1975. Tauri's inventory is generated by its own rule and its count is different. The precedent for building it this way is Xu Bing, who made Book from the Sky — thousands of characters that cannot be read — and then made Square Word Calligraphy as a separate system that can be, rather than going back and making the first one legible.

Her work: allysongrey.com · Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. Go and look at the paintings; they are the reason any of this exists.