Sing-song: a speakable encoding for long numbers and keys

This is a fun experiment that started as a way to generate deterministic "usernames" for Nostr npub keys (see the last section). English is really hard to deal with even for simple syllables, so the result is not as good as I'd want it to be (a string you can read to an other person over the phone and make sure they get it right), but it's not bad either —if everyone spoke Itallian sing-song would be much more valuable :-) Sing-song: speakable encodings for long numbers and keys Status: draft, v0.1.0 --- comments welcome. Abstract Sing-song is a reversible encoding of arbitrary byte strings as pronounceable CV syllables. Its 64-syllable alphabet maps each 6-bit value directly to one syllable. Complete encodings preserve byte length and leading zero bytes, require no external length metadata, and are canonical. The encoding is prefix-stable: shared input prefixes produce shared syllable prefixes. An optional variant suffix provides alternative reversible representations of the same…