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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/43938
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/43938
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

For most people this would be either annoying or far too simple to be interesting.

Many people will know a little bit about substitution ciphers and leet speak. Those are quite often taught in school or used to exchange "secret" messages that teachers / parents / ... aren't supposed to read when paper is an easier medium than using your smartphone. So people will know what to do but many won't be interested in putting their book aside, get some paper out and try to decipher your text just to understand what is going on. They want the characters to solve such riddles. That makes it more of an annoyance than a nice feature.

In the case of leet speak it can even be easy to read this, for example if you are a programmer you will likely have read something about leet speak at one point or another. We talked about it in one of our courses at the university for example. That makes it quite easy to read, at least the first version you presented. But if you used this in your book and said it's some kind of secret code I'd hope your character is one of those that don't like this whole "internet" thing and still prefer their physical newspaper because it reminds them of the good ol' times. And then someone should tell them what leet speak is and "translate" the message. Granted, the second and third leet speak version aren't that easy to read and normally when I am reading books I don't want to half-translate the text I am reading to know what's going on.

If instead you use it to represent some kind of old encrypted text then I wouldn't be able to suspend my disbelief anymore - something that readable is hardly an encrypted message, no matter the time you are in. Better to mention that "the text was encrpyted with an archaic algorithm that our quantum computers could crack in a couple seconds" and be done with it.

A little remark about your premise:

> As you can see this is not a great way to generate secret text ... nor secret languages or alternative languages, since the words generated this way are mostly impossible to pronounce in any given tongue

That makes it perfect to show an ancient encrypted text or just a different language from a different planet. The reader can't read it, the reader can't pronounce it - but most people on this site likely can't read or properly pronounce Japanese text, too. It's just completely foreign. In such a case this could be a nice gimmick for the handful of hard-core sci-fi crypto fans that really _do_ put their books aside to encrypt the message. As it's easy to produce you could indeed hide for example some unimportant but funny messages in such texts. You should still just have someone "translate" the message for the average reader and your characters that are supposed to understand the message.

Original score: 6