Looking for a (probably) alphabetic syllabary
Hello!
Long story short; I am a teacher, and one of my students enjoy puzzles and riddles. I know that in about six months he'll give me a "goodbye letter" as he leaves for a different school, and he's made it clear that he expects me to be able to figure out how to read it. He's shown me parts of how the alphabet is constructed, but so far I haven't been able to find it. Here's what I know.
- It's not his own creation, he's learned it from somewhere else and there are others discussing how to write it as well.
- It has the standard Latin alphabet (A, B, C and so on) represented by new shapes, for example I think the E is an upside down V. Some letters resemble the ones they represent, some don't.
- Every word is constructed by writing these letters "inside" each other. It's not exactly logography if I understand correctly, because it's based on letters, and not exactly syllabary, since it's not just syllables, it's the whole word - it's like if you took all the letters in a word like "writing" and piled them on top of each other, using each other's lines, so the whole word is made into one "block" of symbols.
- There are some rules for how letters can be put together, but it's also possible to write the same word in different ways depending on how you stack your letters.
- My memory of the shapes are mostly straight lines vertically, horizontaly and diagonally, though there were also circles. I don't remember any dots or diacritical marks. There might have been some wavy lines. It didn't remind me of looking at any Asian scripts I've seen, visually.
- It's not a conlang, or rather he isn't using it as one; he's written regular English, only with these symbols.
Does anyone have any suggestions for where I should start looking?