The Deseret Alphabet was a phonetically correct alphabet for English.
In case you are unfamiliar, in many languages, the language is written exactly as it is spoken. For example, in Spanish and Italian, words are written exactly as they are pronounced. If you can read the word, you can pronounce it though you might not know the meaning.
Children in English-speaking places will usually have to study "spelling" where they learn how to correctly spell words.
Deseret alphabet was pronounced exactly as it was written which shows which spoken accents the speakers had.
There's no such thing as "phonetically correct alphabet for English", because the diversity of English dialects (even if you only look at major ones) is such that an alphabet that correctly reflects a phonemic distinction in one is redundant for another. Some examples:
That aside, it would make more sense to take the Latin alphabet as a base, and only add enough new letters to cover what's missing. And if you use diacritics to derive new letters, it's possible to come up with something that can reflect pronunciation accurately in different dialects (using different diacritics where the same words are pronounced differently) while remaining broadly readable across those dialects if diacritics are simply ignored.
> For example, in Spanish and Italian, words are written exactly as they are pronounced
Nope. Spanish is admittedly far more phonemic than English, but there are plenty of exceptions, eg. the letter "x". And of course Spanish writing completely ignores the huge dialectal variations in pronouncing "ll", "c", "z" etc.
Case in point: As someone who was born in an English speaking community but moved to Switzerland (German speaking part) as a child, I had a hard time figuring out what a "spelling bee" was - you know, that trope from tv? It's... just not a thing here in Switzerland and I'm sure it isn't a thing in any neighboring countries.
The language our script most suits is Italian. It's way more regular than Spanish, though your point "you can pronounce it" (from reading alone) is an important one - it might be tricky in French or Spanish or German to figure out exactly how to spell a word, but most kids can pronounce any written word correctly after their first year of reading. Sometimes learning where to stress Greek/Latin-based words can be a bit difficult to figure out, but follows a pattern that is easily picked up.
The problem with these efforts is that they're usually a "correct" spelling for a specific accent/dialect of English -- typically based on the American midwest accent used on news broadcasts. However, English, being a global language has an almost uncountable number of minor accents and dialects which won't conform to a standard phonetic spelling.
Still, these are fun exercises and do point to the absurdity of English orthography.
> *in Spanish ... words are written exactly as they are pronounced
I don't know about that... The pronunciation of 'B' and 'V' varies depending on their position in the word; "conversación" is pronounced as "combersación," etc.
The two theories on motive posed in the article are interesting, but I think there's another one worth considering: the Deseret alphabet looks a lot like Paleo-Hebrew[1] and Armenian[2], both of which would have probably been (vaguely) familiar to the Mormon church's early leadership.
Constructing your own alphabet to resembles the alphabets of the religion(s) you establish your legitimacy via is a savvy political move.
Yeah, have you seen the characters from the plates? Very similar. I had them on a brick on my parents’ shelf growing up. It was sort of a Mormon Household staple, but they are supposedly characters from the original golden plates.
This sounds critical, when it’s not meant to be. Well, historically critical, in that I feel like it aligns with the theory mentioned above.
A lot of Mormon History is a study of political savvy and lack thereof, and I will never not be fascinated by it.
The LaTeX/METAFONT article used as a reference is a pretty good read: http://copper.chem.ucla.edu/~jericks/Historical%20or%20Techn... Reading it, I'm kinda... surprised? By the sophistication brought to the task (eg. the very nice font they got to print with) by the Mormons way out in the middle of nowhere, even if the final alphabet apparently is a bit of a disaster.
They actually posted it yesterday, for what it’s worth. HN has a kind of “second chance” feature which updates the time to simulate a new post. You can check their submission history for the actual submission time.
Does anyone else find it suspicious that deseret looks like desert? Lehi looks like things people had already heard about, and are still towns on the eastern part of the US?
Also mummies. And hieroglyphics. That was quite an intrigue then. (It’s a fascinating period, especially from the southwest perspective. The civil war barely affected the region. Except for a few interesting historical things about Utah statehood and actual cowboys.)
The thing is. Simplified pronunciation was a movement at the time of Brigham Young and later, when most of Salt Lake City actually developed these traditions.
Heck (my people, I’m a descendant of some of the people who built it) still had vineyards and distilleries until the early 20th century. The word of wisdom came out a bit before then!
> While well intentioned, this lack has been described as a "catastrophic" mistake that makes type look "monotonous" and makes all words look alike.
This is really interesting, I wonder if anyone has tried to make new English alphabets that focus on making words easy to distinguish. I guess anyone making anew font is at least considering this point
This matches fairly closely (my concept of) Received Pronunciation (which is basically a standardised kind of posh southern English from the early 20th century, still used in dictionaries). The differences are:
* There's no schwa, which the article discusses.
* I don't see the long vowel of "nurse" in the list. Presumably they wrote their pronunciation of that word with four letters. It's three phonemes in RP (of course there's no R pronounced).
* Three diphthongs (the sounds in "pier", "pair" and "poor") are missing. Presumably they wrote their pronunciations of those words with three letters in each (rather than P plus a diphthong, no R unless the following word starts with a vowel).
* They have a diphthong for the sound of "mule" so that word has three letters. I'd think of it as four phonemes: /mju:l/.
* A couple of RP diphthongs (the sounds in "ale" and "ope") are listed as long vowels. Fair enough: they're simple vowels in some English dialects.
Early Mormon (Latter Day Saint) History is absolutely fascinating, regardless of one's own 'take' on the religion. Given this post is about the Deseret Alphabet, I thought I'd drop this link in regarding the State of Deserethttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Deseret
The full history has a very interesting periodicity around pursuits that are typically associated with academia.
One could argue that the Mormon church has an "academia complex" of many interesting dimensions. Or an extreme love/hate tendency with learning and academic progress that is never quite reconciled.
One of the most fascinating dimensions to me is the sheer number of active-Mormon academics who make a quiet decision to become covert agents working against the leadership of the church. (The September Six were a prominent example of this and other issues in the academic space too)
When my wife and I were considering whether to remain active (both of us born into the religion) and after I had left the local stake leadership at my own will, my wife corresponded with a prominent Mormon academic. Feeling some natural hesitation at the very least due to the tremendous cost to our family and friend relationships, and more (the impact here has been awful).
This academic, well-known to church members, eventually admitted rather bluntly that they saw themselves as one who helped Mormons see through the false stories told by church leaders.
We couldn't believe what we were reading in these messages, after the initial formalities were over and after my wife continued pushing back from the "but you, personally, genuinely don't see a problem with..." angle. But over time I've come to realize that academia kind of has a unique upper hand in the sense that it is a separate, objective social structure with its own support and language system.
So, as long as one doesn't torpedo one's own job directly, church academics can have arguably-deep access to changing minds over time. (It was clearly a bit of an intoxicating concept to the person in question, I think also given their popularity)
It does require listeners to pay a lot of attention to nuance however, so the filtering effect is unfortunately strong compared to people on the more orthodox or fundamentalist side who speak passion-first, as direct as possible, from a position of stubborn belief despite others' positions and experiences.
My observation of academics-oriented personalities within the local church (whether actually academic by profession or not) was that they tended to be almost randomly punished for simply existing. In my mind this was pretty clearly related to the question of whether an individual tended to contribute to the day-to-day order of things with consistent structural adherence & adjustment, or whether they rather did this at a theoretical level, more clearly removed from the little picture. The former being more in line with the preferred personality of the church organization. Ergo, punishment for being who they were.
There's much more I could say about it, but it's really quite a fascinating topic in its way.
And it's not uncommon as an active member to come across artifacts similar to the alphabet in question, which seem really cool, then you find they were in effect abandoned by very intellectual people who are no longer Mormon. That was always a bit awkward as an active Mormon...but, you know how it is with these intellectuals! "When they are learned they think they are wise"...
One of the first Supplemental Multilingual Plane character sets in Unicode, up at U+10400. If there were more 19th century Mormons using the Internet we would have caught all those broken Unicode implementations before the rise of emoji.
[+] [-] thesuperbigfrog|2 years ago|reply
In case you are unfamiliar, in many languages, the language is written exactly as it is spoken. For example, in Spanish and Italian, words are written exactly as they are pronounced. If you can read the word, you can pronounce it though you might not know the meaning.
Children in English-speaking places will usually have to study "spelling" where they learn how to correctly spell words.
Deseret alphabet was pronounced exactly as it was written which shows which spoken accents the speakers had.
English to Deseret translator: https://www.2deseret.com/
Learning to read Deseret primer book: https://archive.org/details/deseretfirstbook00univ/page/n3/m...
[+] [-] int_19h|2 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot%E2%80%93caught_merger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father%E2%80%93bother_merger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap%E2%80%93bath_split
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lot%E2%80%93cloth_split
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Englis...
That aside, it would make more sense to take the Latin alphabet as a base, and only add enough new letters to cover what's missing. And if you use diacritics to derive new letters, it's possible to come up with something that can reflect pronunciation accurately in different dialects (using different diacritics where the same words are pronounced differently) while remaining broadly readable across those dialects if diacritics are simply ignored.
[+] [-] rippercushions|2 years ago|reply
Nope. Spanish is admittedly far more phonemic than English, but there are plenty of exceptions, eg. the letter "x". And of course Spanish writing completely ignores the huge dialectal variations in pronouncing "ll", "c", "z" etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_orthography
[+] [-] Kichererbsen|2 years ago|reply
The language our script most suits is Italian. It's way more regular than Spanish, though your point "you can pronounce it" (from reading alone) is an important one - it might be tricky in French or Spanish or German to figure out exactly how to spell a word, but most kids can pronounce any written word correctly after their first year of reading. Sometimes learning where to stress Greek/Latin-based words can be a bit difficult to figure out, but follows a pattern that is easily picked up.
[+] [-] bane|2 years ago|reply
The problem with these efforts is that they're usually a "correct" spelling for a specific accent/dialect of English -- typically based on the American midwest accent used on news broadcasts. However, English, being a global language has an almost uncountable number of minor accents and dialects which won't conform to a standard phonetic spelling.
Still, these are fun exercises and do point to the absurdity of English orthography.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] elliotec|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Koshkin|2 years ago|reply
I don't know about that... The pronunciation of 'B' and 'V' varies depending on their position in the word; "conversación" is pronounced as "combersación," etc.
[+] [-] woodruffw|2 years ago|reply
Constructing your own alphabet to resembles the alphabets of the religion(s) you establish your legitimacy via is a savvy political move.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Hebrew_alphabet
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_alphabet
[+] [-] mikercampbell|2 years ago|reply
This sounds critical, when it’s not meant to be. Well, historically critical, in that I feel like it aligns with the theory mentioned above.
A lot of Mormon History is a study of political savvy and lack thereof, and I will never not be fascinated by it.
[+] [-] gwern|2 years ago|reply
The main impression I get from it is that shorthand scripts like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitman_shorthand are probably underappreciated now as an inspiration.
[+] [-] 082349872349872|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cardinal7167|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lcnPylGDnU4H9OF|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b33j0r|2 years ago|reply
Also mummies. And hieroglyphics. That was quite an intrigue then. (It’s a fascinating period, especially from the southwest perspective. The civil war barely affected the region. Except for a few interesting historical things about Utah statehood and actual cowboys.)
The thing is. Simplified pronunciation was a movement at the time of Brigham Young and later, when most of Salt Lake City actually developed these traditions.
Heck (my people, I’m a descendant of some of the people who built it) still had vineyards and distilleries until the early 20th century. The word of wisdom came out a bit before then!
[+] [-] shusaku|2 years ago|reply
This is really interesting, I wonder if anyone has tried to make new English alphabets that focus on making words easy to distinguish. I guess anyone making anew font is at least considering this point
[+] [-] neeleshs|2 years ago|reply
Diacritical marks were added to the alphabet to support foreign words that the standard alphabet couldn't support.
[+] [-] bloak|2 years ago|reply
* There's no schwa, which the article discusses.
* I don't see the long vowel of "nurse" in the list. Presumably they wrote their pronunciation of that word with four letters. It's three phonemes in RP (of course there's no R pronounced).
* Three diphthongs (the sounds in "pier", "pair" and "poor") are missing. Presumably they wrote their pronunciations of those words with three letters in each (rather than P plus a diphthong, no R unless the following word starts with a vowel).
* They have a diphthong for the sound of "mule" so that word has three letters. I'd think of it as four phonemes: /mju:l/.
* A couple of RP diphthongs (the sounds in "ale" and "ope") are listed as long vowels. Fair enough: they're simple vowels in some English dialects.
[+] [-] RegularOpossum|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daveslash|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themodelplumber|2 years ago|reply
One could argue that the Mormon church has an "academia complex" of many interesting dimensions. Or an extreme love/hate tendency with learning and academic progress that is never quite reconciled.
One of the most fascinating dimensions to me is the sheer number of active-Mormon academics who make a quiet decision to become covert agents working against the leadership of the church. (The September Six were a prominent example of this and other issues in the academic space too)
When my wife and I were considering whether to remain active (both of us born into the religion) and after I had left the local stake leadership at my own will, my wife corresponded with a prominent Mormon academic. Feeling some natural hesitation at the very least due to the tremendous cost to our family and friend relationships, and more (the impact here has been awful).
This academic, well-known to church members, eventually admitted rather bluntly that they saw themselves as one who helped Mormons see through the false stories told by church leaders.
We couldn't believe what we were reading in these messages, after the initial formalities were over and after my wife continued pushing back from the "but you, personally, genuinely don't see a problem with..." angle. But over time I've come to realize that academia kind of has a unique upper hand in the sense that it is a separate, objective social structure with its own support and language system.
So, as long as one doesn't torpedo one's own job directly, church academics can have arguably-deep access to changing minds over time. (It was clearly a bit of an intoxicating concept to the person in question, I think also given their popularity)
It does require listeners to pay a lot of attention to nuance however, so the filtering effect is unfortunately strong compared to people on the more orthodox or fundamentalist side who speak passion-first, as direct as possible, from a position of stubborn belief despite others' positions and experiences.
My observation of academics-oriented personalities within the local church (whether actually academic by profession or not) was that they tended to be almost randomly punished for simply existing. In my mind this was pretty clearly related to the question of whether an individual tended to contribute to the day-to-day order of things with consistent structural adherence & adjustment, or whether they rather did this at a theoretical level, more clearly removed from the little picture. The former being more in line with the preferred personality of the church organization. Ergo, punishment for being who they were.
There's much more I could say about it, but it's really quite a fascinating topic in its way.
And it's not uncommon as an active member to come across artifacts similar to the alphabet in question, which seem really cool, then you find they were in effect abandoned by very intellectual people who are no longer Mormon. That was always a bit awkward as an active Mormon...but, you know how it is with these intellectuals! "When they are learned they think they are wise"...
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] NelsonMinar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tony_cannistra|2 years ago|reply
that's pretty short for a "heyday," IMO.
[+] [-] willismichael|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] masklinn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] totetsu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hello_computer|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]