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I can't imagine why it's touchy. I just Googled it and found a bit of info. Up until your post, I'd never heard of it.
Basic history, it was backed by Brigham Young and was a phonetic alphabet. It never really took off and died out after BY died.
Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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Yep, found some interesting info on google, too . . . it was just an odd piece of trivia that surfaced during a friendly gathering . . .
Posts: 5609 | Registered: Jan 2003
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The Wikipedia article on it is good, if a little short. I'm not sure what else there is to say about it, though.
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It was not a complete phonetic system. Few alphabets are, but when it was engineered rather than naturally occurring, that's kind of embarrassing. I guess looking at the wiki article, it was intended to help people pronounce English (since a lot of immigrants came to the Mormon community). A particular problem I've heard mentioned was that the R character was used for a postvocalic R, and people seeing it at the beginning of a word would add a syllable before the word. They share quite a bit in terms of order.
And to me, one of the magnificent things about the Latin Alphabet is it's utility as an ordinal system.
The Shavian Alphabet, commissioned by George Bernard Shaw, demonstrates the same flaw of trying to have a different character for every conceivable vowel combination in the language.
It's particular form is due to most of the immigrants being from Northern European countries.
My parents have a Book of Mormon printed in the Deseret Alphabet. It's very cool.
It figures in a post-apocalyptic short story I'm (not really) working on.
I remember finding the Web page of the Mormon programmer who did the unicode version of it way back in 1996. It was one of those "wow look at how cool this Internet thing is" moments for me.
Somewhere I have two articles on it. But I won't bother to dig them out unless people have more questions.
Also: It's not a touchy subject at all -- more an obscure one.
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