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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 s

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 4y ago
[deleted]
elliotec 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
  Not to mention the confusion over B and V.
  - argentinian 4y ago
    What confusion? These are 2 symbols that are pronounced in the same way https://www.rae.es/duda-linguistica/existe-diferencia-en-la-pronunciacion-de-b-y-v https://www.rae.es/duda-linguistica/existe-diferencia-en-la-...
    - int_19h 3y ago
      The confusion is that you have to know which one to use to spell a word correctly; you can't just "spell it as you hear it". But also, the page you've linked to is misleading - it says that Spanish B/V is [b] (bilabial plosive), while in practice it's [β] (bilabial fricative or approximant) in most positions, with [b] as allophone. The phoneme is conventionally written as /b/, yes, but that does not directly correspond to pronunciation.
      - TuringTest 3y ago
        They do have different pronunciations, it's just than most speakers have lost the distinction. B is plosive and V is fricative. Some regions still make that difference, at least senior people do. I had a language teacher from old Castille who sound her spelling of v and b very clearly. She made the distinction between 'll' and 'y' clear as well, with 'll' sounding as a modified 'l', a cross between 'li' and 'ye'.
        int_19h 3y ago
        If most speakers have lost the distinction, then by definition the dialects that still distinguish the two are more marginal, so how can they be considered normative? Sure, historically they were consistently distinguished if you go back far enough, but what difference does it make wrt modern Spanish?
        TuringTest 3y ago
        To modern Spanish, very little difference. It was not consistent in past times either, with classic authors from the Spanish golden age using varying spellings. Just wanted to point out that the variation of sound is not random, but with the sound tied to the letter. Also Spain has something that English does not, which is an official organisation studying the language and making official rules recognising how it's used at different contexts and zones.
- argentinian 4y ago
  As a Spanish speaker I can say that even if it has some phonetic exceptions, Spanish is still extremely easy to pronounce compared to English. However, English grammar is much simpler than Spanish grammar.
  - thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
    >> However, English grammar is much simpler than Spanish grammar. So true. Learning Italian and Spanish as a native English speaker is daunting because of the sheer number of verb tenses and irregular verbs you must master: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conjugation The other challenge is learning the correct gender for inanimate objects: https://learnitalian.web.unc.edu/home/nounsarticlesadjectives/nouns/#:~:text=Most%20Italian%20nouns%20ending%20in,automobile%2C%20stazione%2C%20carne https://learnitalian.web.unc.edu/home/nounsarticlesadjective...). Who would have guessed that a motorcycle is female: https://www.webspanish.com/blog/spanish-lesson-se-dice-el-moto-o-la-moto/ https://www.webspanish.com/blog/spanish-lesson-se-dice-el-mo...
    - argentinian 4y ago
      Certainly. English can express the same ideas with less tenses, and having a gender for inanimate objects is absurd.
      - thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
        But English pronunciation and spelling can be awful: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed." See https://emmawilkin.com/blog/2020/2/17/a-rough-coated-dough-faced-thoughtful-ploughman https://emmawilkin.com/blog/2020/2/17/a-rough-coated-dough-f...
        argentinian 4y ago
- thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
  "the pronunciation of a given Spanish-language word can largely be predicted from its spelling and to a slightly lesser extent vice versa." (from the linked Wikipedia article) Ok, so not 'written exactly as pronounced', but pretty close, especially compared to English. But what human language does not have exceptions to the rule? Or irregular conjugations or forms? >> ignores the huge dialectal variations Most dialects could be considered separate languages with varying degrees of shared ancestry. For that reason, I am not including dialects in my generalization.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    There was an amusing study where they tried to measure how phonemic various language orthographies are by training an ANN model on some data to convert back and forth between spelling and pronunciation, and then checking the error rate on more inputs: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.13321 https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.13321. Here's the table from that paper; numbers are percentages of accurate guesses. Orthography Write Read ----------- ---------- ---------- ar 84.3 ± 0.8 99.4 ± 0.3 br 80.6 ± 0.6 77.2 ± 1.6 de 69.1 ± 1.0 78.0 ± 1.5 en 36.1 ± 1.5 31.1 ± 1.3 eo 99.3 ± 0.2 99.7 ± 0.1 es 66.9 ± 2.0 85.3 ± 1.3 fi 97.7 ± 0.3 92.3 ± 0.8 fr 28.0 ± 1.4 79.6 ± 1.7 it 94.5 ± 0.8 71.6 ± 0.9 ko 81.9 ± 1.0 97.5 ± 0.5 nl 72.9 ± 1.7 55.7 ± 2.2 pt 75.8 ± 1.0 82.4 ± 0.9 ru 41.3 ± 1.6 97.2 ± 0.5 sh 99.2 ± 0.3 99.3 ± 0.3 tr 95.4 ± 0.7 95.9 ± 0.6 zh 19.9 ± 1.4 78.7 ± 0.9 It's easy to see here that English is truly dismal, so being better than it is not a great achievement. Spanish is okay but far from the best. Esperanto (eo) tops the chart for obvious reasons, but note how Serbo-Croatian (sh) is an example of truly outstanding phonemic orthography for an already existing language. Turkish (tr) and Finnish (fi) are also impressive.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - saalweachter 4y ago
      Turkish is especially interesting because it has a solid 80-90 million speakers to sh and fi's 5 million.
- riffraff 3y ago
  Same for Italian, it's 99% there but there's a few holes: the mute "h" in "hotel", "scienza" and "conoscenza" sounding the same "sce" but having an extra i, "gl" has two different pronunciations etc.. It's still far, far better than English.
- SilasX 3y ago
  Also, the silent h and y versus ll. There's a scene in Breaking Bad where Jesse ridicules Skinny Pete for spelling "street" as "streat", and in the Spanish subtitles, it's replaced with "calle" (the word for street) and "caye" (a misspelling). Also sometimes an s will be written as a z. I found some workers' markings under the paint in my bathroom that said "de el pizo" (from the floor), with floor (piso) misspelled. Still, Spanish is better then English about this by a country mile.
bane 4y ago
> a phonetically correct alphabet for English 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.
int_19h 4y ago
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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot%E2%80%93caught_merger 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/Father%E2%80%93bother_merger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap%E2%80%93bath_split 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/Lot%E2%80%93cloth_split https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_diphthongs#Variation_in_present-day_English 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.
- thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
  >> There's no such thing as "phonetically correct alphabet for English", because the diversity of English dialects As I stated in the comments below: "Most dialects could be considered separate languages with varying degrees of shared ancestry. For that reason, I am not including dialects in my generalization." So, to be more precise, the Deseret alphabet was phoenetically correct for the English spoken by the Utah settlers circa 1850 to 1870.
  - feoren 3y ago
    One of the main purposes of language -- especially written language -- is to communicate ideas as widely as possible. Excluding "dialects" is excluding the vast majority of English speakers, especially if you define a dialect as anything different from "English spoken by Utah settlers circa 1850 to 1870". There's a reason these conlangs don't catch on: they're rooted in false and frankly hubristic notions about language, such as: - Language never changes. Okay, well, it used to change constantly, but that stops starting now! - The way we talk is obviously correct and will always be correct, and everyone else is wrong. But this is a cool alphabet to know if you really need to write a message to a mid-19th-century Utah settler. Oh, wait, they wouldn't be able to read it either. But I'm sure it made Brigham Young feel superior to everyone else, which was its actual purpose all along.
Kichererbsen 3y ago
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.
- bonzini 3y ago
  Spelling bee is a thing in French-speaking Switzerland, according to a former colleague of mine from Lausanne.
  - gerikson 3y ago
    I got the feeling that spelling bees are huge in France, at least in the late 80s when I was an exchange student.
    - fanf2 3y ago
      I think the French go in for competitive dictation rather than spelling bees, i.e., running text rather than individual words. It’s a challenge because French is so full of homophones and puns.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  It's not a thing in the UK either.
  - iainmerrick 3y ago
    They're not as high-profile as in the US, but they do exist in the UK. And schools have spelling tests to check kids' progress, even if they don't make it into a big competitive event.
Koshkin 3y ago
> *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.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

elliotec 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
Not to mention the confusion over B and V.
- argentinian 4y ago
  What confusion? These are 2 symbols that are pronounced in the same way https://www.rae.es/duda-linguistica/existe-diferencia-en-la-pronunciacion-de-b-y-v https://www.rae.es/duda-linguistica/existe-diferencia-en-la-...
  - int_19h 3y ago
    The confusion is that you have to know which one to use to spell a word correctly; you can't just "spell it as you hear it". But also, the page you've linked to is misleading - it says that Spanish B/V is [b] (bilabial plosive), while in practice it's [β] (bilabial fricative or approximant) in most positions, with [b] as allophone. The phoneme is conventionally written as /b/, yes, but that does not directly correspond to pronunciation.
    - TuringTest 3y ago
      They do have different pronunciations, it's just than most speakers have lost the distinction. B is plosive and V is fricative. Some regions still make that difference, at least senior people do. I had a language teacher from old Castille who sound her spelling of v and b very clearly. She made the distinction between 'll' and 'y' clear as well, with 'll' sounding as a modified 'l', a cross between 'li' and 'ye'.
      - int_19h 3y ago
        If most speakers have lost the distinction, then by definition the dialects that still distinguish the two are more marginal, so how can they be considered normative? Sure, historically they were consistently distinguished if you go back far enough, but what difference does it make wrt modern Spanish?
        TuringTest 3y ago
        To modern Spanish, very little difference. It was not consistent in past times either, with classic authors from the Spanish golden age using varying spellings. Just wanted to point out that the variation of sound is not random, but with the sound tied to the letter. Also Spain has something that English does not, which is an official organisation studying the language and making official rules recognising how it's used at different contexts and zones.
argentinian 4y ago
As a Spanish speaker I can say that even if it has some phonetic exceptions, Spanish is still extremely easy to pronounce compared to English. However, English grammar is much simpler than Spanish grammar.
- thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
  >> However, English grammar is much simpler than Spanish grammar. So true. Learning Italian and Spanish as a native English speaker is daunting because of the sheer number of verb tenses and irregular verbs you must master: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conjugation The other challenge is learning the correct gender for inanimate objects: https://learnitalian.web.unc.edu/home/nounsarticlesadjectives/nouns/#:~:text=Most%20Italian%20nouns%20ending%20in,automobile%2C%20stazione%2C%20carne https://learnitalian.web.unc.edu/home/nounsarticlesadjective...). Who would have guessed that a motorcycle is female: https://www.webspanish.com/blog/spanish-lesson-se-dice-el-moto-o-la-moto/ https://www.webspanish.com/blog/spanish-lesson-se-dice-el-mo...
  - argentinian 4y ago
    Certainly. English can express the same ideas with less tenses, and having a gender for inanimate objects is absurd.
    - thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
      But English pronunciation and spelling can be awful: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed." See https://emmawilkin.com/blog/2020/2/17/a-rough-coated-dough-faced-thoughtful-ploughman https://emmawilkin.com/blog/2020/2/17/a-rough-coated-dough-f...
      - argentinian 4y ago
thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
"the pronunciation of a given Spanish-language word can largely be predicted from its spelling and to a slightly lesser extent vice versa." (from the linked Wikipedia article) Ok, so not 'written exactly as pronounced', but pretty close, especially compared to English. But what human language does not have exceptions to the rule? Or irregular conjugations or forms? >> ignores the huge dialectal variations Most dialects could be considered separate languages with varying degrees of shared ancestry. For that reason, I am not including dialects in my generalization.
- int_19h 4y ago
  There was an amusing study where they tried to measure how phonemic various language orthographies are by training an ANN model on some data to convert back and forth between spelling and pronunciation, and then checking the error rate on more inputs: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.13321 https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.13321. Here's the table from that paper; numbers are percentages of accurate guesses. Orthography Write Read ----------- ---------- ---------- ar 84.3 ± 0.8 99.4 ± 0.3 br 80.6 ± 0.6 77.2 ± 1.6 de 69.1 ± 1.0 78.0 ± 1.5 en 36.1 ± 1.5 31.1 ± 1.3 eo 99.3 ± 0.2 99.7 ± 0.1 es 66.9 ± 2.0 85.3 ± 1.3 fi 97.7 ± 0.3 92.3 ± 0.8 fr 28.0 ± 1.4 79.6 ± 1.7 it 94.5 ± 0.8 71.6 ± 0.9 ko 81.9 ± 1.0 97.5 ± 0.5 nl 72.9 ± 1.7 55.7 ± 2.2 pt 75.8 ± 1.0 82.4 ± 0.9 ru 41.3 ± 1.6 97.2 ± 0.5 sh 99.2 ± 0.3 99.3 ± 0.3 tr 95.4 ± 0.7 95.9 ± 0.6 zh 19.9 ± 1.4 78.7 ± 0.9 It's easy to see here that English is truly dismal, so being better than it is not a great achievement. Spanish is okay but far from the best. Esperanto (eo) tops the chart for obvious reasons, but note how Serbo-Croatian (sh) is an example of truly outstanding phonemic orthography for an already existing language. Turkish (tr) and Finnish (fi) are also impressive.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - saalweachter 4y ago
    Turkish is especially interesting because it has a solid 80-90 million speakers to sh and fi's 5 million.
riffraff 3y ago
Same for Italian, it's 99% there but there's a few holes: the mute "h" in "hotel", "scienza" and "conoscenza" sounding the same "sce" but having an extra i, "gl" has two different pronunciations etc.. It's still far, far better than English.
SilasX 3y ago
Also, the silent h and y versus ll. There's a scene in Breaking Bad where Jesse ridicules Skinny Pete for spelling "street" as "streat", and in the Spanish subtitles, it's replaced with "calle" (the word for street) and "caye" (a misspelling). Also sometimes an s will be written as a z. I found some workers' markings under the paint in my bathroom that said "de el pizo" (from the floor), with floor (piso) misspelled. Still, Spanish is better then English about this by a country mile.

bane 4y ago

> a phonetically correct alphabet for English 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.

int_19h 4y ago

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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot%E2%80%93caught_merger 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/Father%E2%80%93bother_merger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap%E2%80%93bath_split 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/Lot%E2%80%93cloth_split https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_diphthongs#Variation_in_present-day_English 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.

thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
>> There's no such thing as "phonetically correct alphabet for English", because the diversity of English dialects As I stated in the comments below: "Most dialects could be considered separate languages with varying degrees of shared ancestry. For that reason, I am not including dialects in my generalization." So, to be more precise, the Deseret alphabet was phoenetically correct for the English spoken by the Utah settlers circa 1850 to 1870.
- feoren 3y ago
  One of the main purposes of language -- especially written language -- is to communicate ideas as widely as possible. Excluding "dialects" is excluding the vast majority of English speakers, especially if you define a dialect as anything different from "English spoken by Utah settlers circa 1850 to 1870". There's a reason these conlangs don't catch on: they're rooted in false and frankly hubristic notions about language, such as: - Language never changes. Okay, well, it used to change constantly, but that stops starting now! - The way we talk is obviously correct and will always be correct, and everyone else is wrong. But this is a cool alphabet to know if you really need to write a message to a mid-19th-century Utah settler. Oh, wait, they wouldn't be able to read it either. But I'm sure it made Brigham Young feel superior to everyone else, which was its actual purpose all along.

Kichererbsen 3y ago

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.

bonzini 3y ago
Spelling bee is a thing in French-speaking Switzerland, according to a former colleague of mine from Lausanne.
- gerikson 3y ago
  I got the feeling that spelling bees are huge in France, at least in the late 80s when I was an exchange student.
  - fanf2 3y ago
    I think the French go in for competitive dictation rather than spelling bees, i.e., running text rather than individual words. It’s a challenge because French is so full of homophones and puns.
IshKebab 3y ago
It's not a thing in the UK either.
- iainmerrick 3y ago
  They're not as high-profile as in the US, but they do exist in the UK. And schools have spelling tests to check kids' progress, even if they don't make it into a big competitive event.

Koshkin 3y ago

> *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.