7 ms·

Deseret Alphabet

140 points by luu 4y ago

tony_cannistra 3y ago
> "During the alphabet's heyday between 1854 and 1869..." that's pretty short for a "heyday," IMO.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- willismichael 3y ago
  Well, in this forum we've had plenty of hype about programming languages that ended up having heydays less than 10% that length of time.
- masklinn 3y ago
  Longer than the confederacy still.
RegularOpossum 3y ago
Early Mormon history is absolutely fascinating, it's fun and goofy at parts, and then there's parts where quite a number of of people die.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- daveslash 3y ago
  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 Deseret https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Deseret https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Deseret
- themodelplumber 3y ago
  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"...
thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
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. English to Deseret translator: https://www.2deseret.com/ https://www.2deseret.com/ Learning to read Deseret primer book: https://archive.org/details/deseretfirstbook00univ/page/n3/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/deseretfirstbook00univ/page/n3/m...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- elliotec 3y ago
  I wrote an article on this topic a while back and how to use the Deseret Alphabet on the internet with web fonts which was a super fun project: https://elliotec.com/writing-in-the-deseret-alphabet/ https://elliotec.com/writing-in-the-deseret-alphabet/
- rippercushions 3y ago
  > 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_orthography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_orthography
  - yosito 3y ago
    Not to mention the confusion over B and V.
    - argentinian 3y ago
woodruffw 3y ago
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. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Hebrew_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Hebrew_alphabet [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_alphabet
- mikercampbell 3y ago
  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.
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    Right! The observation about legitimacy was not meant to be (uniquely) derogatory: almost every religion or organized movement appeals to some historically accepted source of authority. Compare neoclassical architecture, etc.
NelsonMinar 3y ago
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.
Cardinal7167 3y ago
Ah, I see someone went on a deep dive of Utah lore after reading the PornHub ban thread
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  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.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    It was most likely inspired by some comments on the Mormons in the FBI thread from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35775565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35775565
gwern 3y ago
The LaTeX/METAFONT article used as a reference is a pretty good read: http://copper.chem.ucla.edu/~jericks/Historical%20or%20Technical/History%20Looking%20Backwards/Ken%20Beesley/Typesetting%20the%20Deseret%20Alphabet%20with%20LATEX%20and%20METAFONT.pdf 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. The main impression I get from it is that shorthand scripts like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitman_shorthand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitman_shorthand are probably underappreciated now as an inspiration.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  I wonder about the inspiration of non-english phonetic scripts (eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari ) for english shorthands (and related scripts, eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet )?
shusaku 3y ago
> 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
totetsu 3y ago
𐐌 𐐰𐑅𐐿 𐐿𐐪𐐻 𐑀𐐩𐐹 𐑄 𐐶𐑉𐐮𐐻 𐑄 𐐿𐐲𐑋𐐯𐑌𐐻 𐐮𐑌 𐑄 𐐼𐐯𐑅𐐯𐑉𐐻 𐐈𐑊𐐹𐐲𐑌𐐼 𐐰𐑌𐐼 𐐮𐑄 𐐿𐐳𐐼 𐐼𐐬 𐐮𐑄.
- hello_computer 3y ago
  [dead]
neeleshs 3y ago
Most Indian languages have a phonetically correct alphabet. My native language, Kannada , is what you write is how you pronounce it. Diacritical marks were added to the alphabet to support foreign words that the standard alphabet couldn't support.
b33j0r 3y ago
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!
bloak 3y ago
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.

Deseret Alphabet

140 points by luu 4y ago

tony_cannistra 3y ago

> "During the alphabet's heyday between 1854 and 1869..." that's pretty short for a "heyday," IMO.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
willismichael 3y ago
Well, in this forum we've had plenty of hype about programming languages that ended up having heydays less than 10% that length of time.
masklinn 3y ago
Longer than the confederacy still.

RegularOpossum 3y ago

Early Mormon history is absolutely fascinating, it's fun and goofy at parts, and then there's parts where quite a number of of people die.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
daveslash 3y ago
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 Deseret https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Deseret https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Deseret
themodelplumber 3y ago
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"...

thesuperbigfrog 3y ago

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. English to Deseret translator: https://www.2deseret.com/ https://www.2deseret.com/ Learning to read Deseret primer book: https://archive.org/details/deseretfirstbook00univ/page/n3/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/deseretfirstbook00univ/page/n3/m...

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
elliotec 3y ago
I wrote an article on this topic a while back and how to use the Deseret Alphabet on the internet with web fonts which was a super fun project: https://elliotec.com/writing-in-the-deseret-alphabet/ https://elliotec.com/writing-in-the-deseret-alphabet/
rippercushions 3y ago
> 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_orthography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_orthography
- yosito 3y ago
  Not to mention the confusion over B and V.
  - argentinian 3y ago

woodruffw 3y ago

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. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Hebrew_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Hebrew_alphabet [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_alphabet

mikercampbell 3y ago
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.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  Right! The observation about legitimacy was not meant to be (uniquely) derogatory: almost every religion or organized movement appeals to some historically accepted source of authority. Compare neoclassical architecture, etc.

NelsonMinar 3y ago

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.

Cardinal7167 3y ago

Ah, I see someone went on a deep dive of Utah lore after reading the PornHub ban thread

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
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.
- lolinder 3y ago
  It was most likely inspired by some comments on the Mormons in the FBI thread from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35775565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35775565

gwern 3y ago

The LaTeX/METAFONT article used as a reference is a pretty good read: http://copper.chem.ucla.edu/~jericks/Historical%20or%20Technical/History%20Looking%20Backwards/Ken%20Beesley/Typesetting%20the%20Deseret%20Alphabet%20with%20LATEX%20and%20METAFONT.pdf 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. The main impression I get from it is that shorthand scripts like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitman_shorthand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitman_shorthand are probably underappreciated now as an inspiration.

082349872349872 3y ago
I wonder about the inspiration of non-english phonetic scripts (eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari ) for english shorthands (and related scripts, eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet )?

shusaku 3y ago

> 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

totetsu 3y ago

𐐌 𐐰𐑅𐐿 𐐿𐐪𐐻 𐑀𐐩𐐹 𐑄 𐐶𐑉𐐮𐐻 𐑄 𐐿𐐲𐑋𐐯𐑌𐐻 𐐮𐑌 𐑄 𐐼𐐯𐑅𐐯𐑉𐐻 𐐈𐑊𐐹𐐲𐑌𐐼 𐐰𐑌𐐼 𐐮𐑄 𐐿𐐳𐐼 𐐼𐐬 𐐮𐑄.

hello_computer 3y ago
[dead]

neeleshs 3y ago

Most Indian languages have a phonetically correct alphabet. My native language, Kannada , is what you write is how you pronounce it. Diacritical marks were added to the alphabet to support foreign words that the standard alphabet couldn't support.

b33j0r 3y ago

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!

bloak 3y ago

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.