Deseret alphabet
The Deseret alphabet () is a writing system invented in the 19th Century in America by the Mormon Church. A group of leaders called the Board of Regents created it. They were from Brigham Young University.
Brigham Young wanted all letters to match sounds, to make reading and writing easier for immigrants. Teachers taught the alphabet in the school system at the time.
Between 1854 and 1869, books, newspapers, street signs and mail used the new alphabet. Even though the LDS church tried very hard to support the alphabet, it wasn' t continued for very long.
History
Creation (1847-1854)
Church leaders Brigham Young, Parley P. Pratt and Heber C. Kimball were part of the Board of Regents that made the Deseret alphabet. Other important creators were George D. Watt and William W. Phelps.
Before they decided to use the Deseret alphabet, the Board of Regents thought they would use Pitman style alphabets. On 29 November 1853, they came together to vote. Then, Willard Richards, who was sick when the Board of Regents had talked about which alphabet to use, saw the Pitman style alphabet. He said it looked too much like the English alphabet, and he wanted to start over with something new. His words convinced Brigham Young and the rest of the Board of Regents to make the Deseret alphabet. Less than two months later, the Board of Regents approved the first 38-letter Deseret alphabet.
Alphabet
In the Deseret alphabet, capital letters (" majuscule" or upper case) look the same as the lower case (" minuscule" ) letters, except the capital letters are larger. In the chart below, the" Glyph" is the letter shape, and next to it is the letter' s name, which is how it sounds.
Related pages
International Phonetic Alphabet
Brigham Young
References
Further reading
Bigler, David. 1998. Forgotten kingdom: the Mormon theocracy in the American West, 1847-1896. Spokane: Arthur Clark
Ivins, Stanley S. 1947. The Deseret Alphabet. Utah Humanities Review 1: 223-39.
Lynott, Patricia A. 1999." Communicating Insularity: The Deseret Alphabet of Nineteenth-Century Mormon Education." American Educational History Journal 26 (1): 20-26.
Thompson, Roger. 1982. Language planning in frontier America: The case of the Deseret Alphabet. Language Problems and Language Planning 6: 45-62.
Wintersteen, Larry Ray. 1970. A History of the Deseret Alphabet. MA thesis, Brigham Young University. .
Other websites
The Mormon Alphabet Experiment |" From the Stacks" at New-York Historical Society
M. Scott Reynolds' Deseret alphabet portal
Joshua Erickson' s Deseret alphabet pages
The Deseret Alphabet at Omniglot
Deseret Alphabet Translator Converts standard orthography to Deseret alphabet and vice versa
Deseret to IPA converter Converts Deseret input to International Phonetic Alphabet
Alphabets
Mormonism