Deseret alphabet

An excerpt from an introduction to Deseret from 1868. The first line reads "One of the worst habit ..."

5 dollar gold coin from 1860 with the inscription "Holiness to the Lord" ("?????? ?? ? ????") in Deseret

The Deseret alphabet , sometimes called the Mormon alphabet , is a phonetic alphabet written in the mid- 19th century at the University of Deseret (later University of Utah ) under the tutelage of Brigham Young , second President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints .

history

The chief creators were church leader Parley P. Pratt and Young's private secretary George D. Watt.

It is a letter font , the cursive letters of which have a distant resemblance to the Cherokee script , even if there is no connection between the two. Via Young's secretary, there are also points of contact with the then common form of shorthand .

Excerpt from the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5: 1–15) in the Deseret alphabet; Published February 18, 1859 in Deseret News

The goal of this redesigned font was to consistently write English phonetically . This seemed particularly important at the time, as many members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints immigrated to Utah, but came from different countries with very different pronunciations of the same written Latin letter, but very few spoke English. The Deseret alphabet should help fix this problem. At the same time, it was intended to further promote the independent national identity of the Mormons and the distance to the rest of the Americans, which began to develop in the decades of isolation. The introduction should be implemented gradually over a longer period of time, also because there was initially a lack of suitable print types. Two primers were published, an excerpt from the Book of Mormon, and a very small edition of an entire Book of Mormon printed in this script in New York; the Mormon newspaper, the Deseret News , also appeared for a period of time in short individual articles in this script.

The writing was a matter close to the heart of Brigham Young, for which considerable sums of money were invested, but which many other Mormon church leaders were rather skeptical of. When the railroad reached what is now Utah a few years after the alphabet was published and the isolation lifted, whereupon many non-Mormons also settled there, the project was postponed due to impracticability and officially abandoned after Young's death.

alphabet

character	Surname	IPA	character	Surname	IPA	character	Surname	IPA	character	Surname	IPA
? ?	Long I	/ iː /	? ?	Long E	/ eɪ /	? ?	Long A	/ ɑː /	? ?	Long Ah	/ ɔː /
? ?	Long O	/ oʊ /	? ?	Long Oo	/ uː /	? ?	Short I.	/ ɪ /	? ?	Short E	/ ɛ /
? ?	Short A	/ æ /	? ?	Short Ah	/ ɒ /	? ?	Short O	/ ʌ /	? ?	Short Oo	/ ʊ /
? ?	Ay	/ aɪ /	? ?	Ow	/ aʊ /	? ?	Wu	/ w /	? ?	Yee	/ y /
? ?	H	/H/	? ?	Pee	/ p /	? ?	Bee	/ b /	? ?	tea	/ t /
? ?	Dee	/ d /	? ?	Chee	/ tʃ /	? ?	Yeah	/ dʒ /	? ?	Kay	/ k /
? ?	Gay	/ ɡ /	? ?	Ef	/ f /	? ?	Vee	/ v /	? ?	Eth	/ θ /
? ?	Tea	/ ð /	? ?	It	/ s /	? ?	Zee	/ z /	? ?	Esh	/ ʃ /
? ?	Zhee	/ ʒ /	? ?	He	/ r /	? ?	El	/ l /	? ?	Em	/ m /
? ?	En	/ n /	? ?	Closely	/ ŋ /	? ?	Oi	/ ɔɪ /	? ?	Ew	/ juː /

Although is a Deseret alphabet with uppercase and lowercase letters, but the only difference between small letters and capital letters is the size. There are no different forms such as in the Latin alphabet.

Deseret does not have its own symbol for the schwa , instead the letter is used for the vowel that would appear in the corresponding syllable if it were exceptionally stressed; if the syllable is always unstressed, "?" (Short O) is used. For monosyllabic words that sound like the name of one of the consonant letters, this letter is written alone - e.g. B. for the word "tea" (dt. Tea) only "?" instead of "??" written. It also follows from the two rules that the definite article "the" is written as a single "?".

Today's use of the Deseret alphabet

Sentencing examples in the Deseret alphabet: 1. Where is my room? 2. Where is the beach? 3. Where is the bar? 4. Do not touch me there!

Linguists and historians receive evidence from the original sources of how the English words were pronounced in the US state of Utah in the 1860s ; In addition, the Deseret font is used as a hobby, which can also be seen in a Facebook group with 227 members that has been in existence since 2014 (as of May 6, 2020) and the rapidly increasing number of books in Deseret script.

Since 2012, over 70 books in the Deseret alphabet, predominantly classics of world literature, have been published. Apart from the famous children's book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ( Alice in Wonderland ) by British writer Lewis Carroll there are also works of Jane Austen , Daniel Defoe , Charles Dickens , Sir Arthur Conan Doyle , William Shakespeare , Robert Louis Stevenson , Mark Twain , Oscar Wilde and many others. The Old Testament and the New Testament were also published in the Deseret alphabet.

literature

Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - all text in Deseret alphabet

Neil Alexander Walker: A Complete Guide to Reading and Writing the Deseret Alphabet, o. O. 2005 - detailed learning guide to Deseret writing in English
Lewis Carroll : Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (????'? ????????? ?? ??????????). An edition printed in the Deseret Alphabet, Cathair na Mart ( Westport / Ireland) 2013
Lewis Carrol: The Hunting of the Snark (? ?????? ?? ? ?????). An edition printed in the Deseret Alphabet, Portlaoise (Ireland) 2016
Lewis Caroll: Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There: (??? ? ?????-???? ??? ???? ???? ???? ???). An edition printed in the Deseret Alphabet, Cathair na Mart ( Westport / Ireland) 2016
The Deseret First Book, Salt Lake City 1868
The Deseret Second Book, Salt Lake City 1868
The Book of Mormon, New York 1869 - Complete Book of Mormon
The Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price - complete Deseret editions of the Book of Mormon , the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price in a rewriting of 1997
over 50 other classics of world literature in the Deseret alphabet have been published since 2012

Web links

Commons : Deseret Alphabet - collection of images, videos, and audio files

References and comments

[1] Newspaper article greatly enlarged as a PDF file

[2] r today's use cf. Summary

[3] Facebook group on the Deseret alphabet

[Veröffentlichungen-4] Publications in the Deseret alphabet since 2012

[5] Reading excerpt from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

[6] Reading excerpt from The Hunting of the Snark and explanations by Michael Everson

[7] Reading sample from Through the Looking-Glass