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.
>> 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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
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..
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 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.
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.
Readit News
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...
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.
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.
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
However, English grammar is much simpler than Spanish grammar.
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.
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.
It's still far, far better than English.
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
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
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 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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35775565
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!
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
Diacritical marks were added to the alphabet to support foreign words that the standard alphabet couldn't support.
* 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.