To be, or not to be - What is the question?

Question

I just wanted to test my encryption skills with this wonderful community that seems to be able to crack almost any code! I've made a few codes before, but almost always, they were encoded several times over, sometimes in several different languages, and not meant to be decoded by anyone but the recipient. This is a new style of encryption for me - making a code that is meant to be hard, but not unsolvable, so please excuse me if it is too hard or too easy. Anyway, here goes.

The encrypted string to solve is

1jz1hy2rpukx1rw2bkv1trlu

Hint 1:

Encrypted with the exact same encryption as the one above, the phrase "How are you today, friend?" results in 1ydz2ky2bx2hlbw2nkrlv.

Hint 2:

In addition, the phrase "What does the fox say?" results in 1dyhz2ljy1hyx1ncw1jbv

Hint 3:

You guys seem to be having some trouble. "Black baboons like butter." enciphers to 1puevz3pprjy2uvx2phhkw.

Note: Proper spelin is the key to solving this problem. If you mess up your spelling, you likely won't get anywhere.

Also, the first paragraph legitimately has nothing to do with solving the encryption.

Answer 1

[EDITED to fix some mistakes]

I think the decoded message is probably

IS IT NOBLER IN YOUR MIND

given the title of the puzzle, though it's ambiguous and other readings are possible. Most of what I'm about to say is found in comments on the question, but no one's actually given an answer so I might as well :-).

(I suffered a little because of the ambiguity, which is a little outrageous, but fortunately I was able to find what I'm pretty sure was the right decoding and put an end to my troubles.)

So, each word

turns into a number followed by some letters.

The number indicates

the number of vowels in the word (Y is not a vowel for this purpose). There is no further information about what or where the vowels are, hence the ambiguity.

The letters encode

the consonants, in order, according to a simple substitution cipher.

The cipher

is constructed in the traditional sort of way where letters in the early part of the alphabet translate to letters of a keyword (duplicates removed) and after that we traverse the alphabet in order, though slightly unusually the order here is reversed.

Specifically,

the key is ?PEL?N, which is presumably SPELIN as the question actually tells us, and after that the letters go ZY??VU?R???KJH??DCB? which nicely matches reverse order starting with Z. Of course we can never know for sure what the vowels are meant to map to, since they are never actually mapped to anything.

So our message decodes as

[1]S [1]T [2]NBLR [1]N [2]YR [1]MND

and

there are many possibilities for all of the words but the one I gave above seems to fit best.