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One of my passions is the Deseret Alphabet (DA), a 19th-century American script created by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints after their exodus from Nauvoo to the Salt Lake Valley. I& #39;ll discuss the alphabet by displaying pix of an original DA book I own.
The DA was the brainchild of Brigham Young and his advisers. It was inspired by British phonotypy, and its actual design (in terms of shapes and function) was the result of George D. Watt, a UK-born secretary of B. Young who was trained in Pitman shorthand.
(Watt was an interesting character: he would later be excommunicated from the Church and had six wives.) The original DA script was a cursive one, but an uglier (if more functional for printing) style was created for the first DA newspaper clips and books.
The conservative sounds system and spellings were roughly a mixture of London English and New England English (e.g. FAST was ๐๐ช๐
๐ป fษst, but /ษน/ is preserved in coda position and there is no special symbol for British /ษ/ (๐ฒ๐ สษน used instead).
Earlier versions of the alphabet had 40 letters, but the "classical" form of DA books had 38 (using the digraphs ๐ฎ๐ญ ษชu & ๐ฑ๐ฎ ษษช for earlier ๐ & ๐). Each letter& #39;s name was also its sound value in isolation: & #39;If ye be they, the gay one...& #39; is ๐ฎ๐ ๐ท ๐บ ๐๐ฉ, ๐ ๐ ๐ถ๐ฒ๐...
The order of the alphabet was according to natural classes: vowels before consonants, "long" vowels before short vowels, front before back, monophthongs before diphthongs, stops before fricatives, fricatives before sonorants, voiceless before voiced...
The DA was an autochthonous creation of Deseret, the would-be Mormon state that sat astride the Great Basin. It was the script of a people--it is not akin to Shavian or Pitman scripts in its origins and uses. Before it quietly died out as a medium of communication, it...
...was used in the taking of church minutes, letters from missionaries, on coinage, in newspapers, in books (primers such as this one and the Book of Mormon), signage, gravestones, and even in the transcription of Native American languages!
Dr. Kenneth Beesley identified a Hopi dictionary written entirely in the DA, which he co-published with Professor Dirk Elzinga ( https://byustudies.byu.edu/content/1860-english-hopi-vocabulary-written-deseret-alphabet">https://byustudies.byu.edu/content/1... ). There are doubtless additional DA materials which remain to be discovered.
The 1860 Mormon $5 gold coin included the DA inscription ๐ธ๐ฌ๐๐ฎ๐๐
๐ป๐ญ ๐ ๐๐ซ๐๐ผ hoอกสlษชnษอกs tu รฐอกi lษษนd & #39;Holiness to the Lord& #39; (its use of ๐
for its syllabic value within a multi-letter word was idiosyncratic).
The DA primers can be purchased for $100-$300 USD; the reader with portions of the Book of Mormon goes for ~$300 USD, and the full Book of Mormon (of which a limited number were printed) goes for $6,000-$8,000 USD (when you can find one). The coin goes for tens of thousands!
๐๐ฌ ๐ ๐๐ฏ๐๐ฒ๐๐ฏ๐ป ๐๐๐๐ฒ๐บ๐ฏ๐ป ๐ฎ๐ ๐๐ฌ ๐๐ซ๐๐๐ฒ๐ ๐๐๐ผ ๐บ๐ด ๐ ๐ฃ๐ซ๐๐๐ฒ๐ ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐๐๐๐ฎ๐ป๐จ, ๐๐ฉ๐ ๐ช๐ ๐๐ช๐ผ๐ฒ๐๐ ๐น๐๐ฐ๐ฟ๐ป๐ฎ๐๐ฒ๐๐ฏ๐๐ ๐ธ๐ญ ๐
๐ป๐ฎ๐ ๐ฒ๐น๐๐จ๐๐จ๐ฉ๐ป ๐ ๐๐ณ๐ฟ ๐ฐ๐๐ผ ๐ธ๐ฎ๐
๐ป๐ซ๐๐จ ๐ช๐ ๐ ๐
๐ฟ๐๐ฎ๐น๐ป. ๐๐ฐ๐๐ฟ๐
๐๐ซ๐ ๐๐จ๐ผ๐ฎ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐
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