“[The Jaredites] did carry with them swarms of spelling bees…”

May 6, 2016 4:35 PM

The Deseret Alphabet came about on January 19, 1854 when the Board of Regents of the University of Deseret, now the University of Utah, announced that they had adopted a new phonetic alphabet. The new alphabet consisted of 38 to 40 characters and was developed mostly by George D. Watt, who was on a committee called by President Brigham Young as part of a project to help simplify spelling in the English Language.
DeseretAlphabet.org has everything you need to know about this writing system, including a collection of external resources such as: XKCD rewritten in Deseret; Sans Serif and web fonts (though you could just use unicode); books rewritten in Deseret; and various news stories about the alphabet.
posted by Going To Maine (20 comments total)

if you're anything like me (linux user), you can install google's noto fonts so that the main wikipedia page displays correctly (more exactly, you need noto-sans-deseret (link to zip, but they may be available in you local package manager)).
posted by andrewcooke at 4:48 PM on May 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Interesting—I had heard of this alphabet, but knew nothing about it. It's vaguely reminiscent of the Cherokee syllabary; I wonder if the Deseret folks were familiar with that?
posted by languagehat at 4:52 PM on May 6, 2016

Now you may ask — why would they invent a new alphabet? To accommodate the Scandinavian converts who were immigrating to Zion?

Maybe. But consider: what if the Deseret alphabet took off among Mormons to the extent that they'd be unable to read anything printed outside the Utah Valley?

Information control.
posted by fontor at 5:17 PM on May 6, 2016 [13 favorites]

I imagine that the Cherokee and Deseret scripts look like the Latin alphabet because they were both developed by people at least familiar with the Latin alphabet.
posted by Small Dollar at 5:43 PM on May 6, 2016

Information control.

Yep. Sounds a bit like the Chinese Communist Party developing Simplified Chinese, as to have a population sufficiently literate to be productive and yet unable to read subversive literature from before the establishment of the PRC.
posted by acb at 5:53 PM on May 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'd not be surprised if English eventually reverts back to the time when you could just spell words how God moved you
posted by thelonius at 6:04 PM on May 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

reverts back?

Have you seen kids and their apostrophes these days?
posted by Going To Maine at 6:08 PM on May 6, 2016 [10 favorites]

Yep. Sounds a bit like the Chinese Communist Party developing Simplified Chinese, as to have a population sufficiently literate to be productive and yet unable to read subversive literature from before the establishment of the PRC.

Most educated people in China have no problem reading Traditional Chinese. Simplified Chinese was developed to increase literacy not because of any sort of literary inquisition.
posted by Carius at 6:21 PM on May 6, 2016 [4 favorites]

'
posted by sneebler at 6:26 PM on May 6, 2016

With all those extra letters, the Deseret alphabet song probably wasn't "twinkle twinkle little star", but "flight of the bumblebee."
posted by jenkinsEar at 7:45 PM on May 6, 2016

Opposite of SNL's decabet sketch.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:43 PM on May 6, 2016

Oh cool, I've heard of this alphabet but never looked at it that much.

> XKCD rewritten in Deseret

Do they have my favourite? Oh yes, they do. Let us learn to write some interesting new expressions!

"𐐌 𐐰𐑋 𐐪 𐐻𐐲𐑉𐐻𐐲𐑊." "𐐏𐑏'𐑉 𐐪 𐐻𐐲𐑉𐐻𐐲𐑊!"

Awww. 🐢
posted by wwwwolf at 5:04 AM on May 7, 2016

Have you seen kids and their apostrophes these days?

Did you mean kid's?
posted by longbaugh at 5:46 AM on May 7, 2016

I was going to go with apostrophe's, but OK.
posted by Literaryhero at 6:42 AM on May 7, 2016

Converts "Dogs cats sue zoo".

Oh, making a plural means adding an s or z now, according to pronunciation? Yeah, that'll be easier to learn...
posted by alasdair at 11:50 AM on May 7, 2016

Tl;dr, can someone just tell me if they have a poop emoji?
posted by man down under at 12:26 AM on May 8, 2016

I remember when I discovered this in the unicode tables. I was fascinated. Then I found Shavian! I'll take George Bernard Shaw over Brigham Young any day of the week!
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 10:01 AM on May 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

This might be great in any number of different ways, but it seems to me it's just plain ugly. I'm having problems discerning if that's my own cultural predilections or what. I don't think so though - I can't read a lick of Japanese, or Mandarin, or Sandskrit, or Arabic, and I find that texts in these languages/alphabets to be innately beautiful. Cyrillic too is a beautiful alphabet (though Russian in cursive vexes me) and I'm a sucker for Garamond. (Tengwar though, holey smokes is that gorgeous.) Does anyone else feel this way at all?
posted by newdaddy at 6:31 PM on May 8, 2016

I can’t say it vexes me that much, but it’s my post. Also, I find Cyrillic ugly as sin; this might just be a matter of beauty being in the eye of the reader.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:37 PM on May 8, 2016

I think we can safely agree to disagree on this. This is a great post though, thanks for sharing something I was completely unaware of before now.
posted by newdaddy at 7:28 AM on May 9, 2016