I love writing systems, be they real or fictional, widely used or extinct, deciphered or indeciphered, but at no point will I tell you that I'm any kind of linguist. My lack of knowledge of the basic principles of linguistics makes me not even an amateur because all that I know is essentially trivia, making each statement made by myself on the subject an intellectual owl pellet of randomly gathered bits and bobs, the moss gathered by my mind's rolling stone*. In my mind how a language is written and appears visually is a large part of its identity and for a non-speaking linguae viatori patuit** like myself the script makes far stronger an impression than the speech it is made to represent. Naturally this means the more aesthetically colorful the script the better it is, which is why I put the primary Georgian alphabet, Mkhreduli -
- at the top of my list of best scripts. The script of Georgian is as unique and untraceable as Georgian itself (and its minority siblings in the Kartvelian familiy), its elegant loops as alluring as they are deceptively easy to write. In my crypto-cruising I've found more veins of gold, such as Mi'kmaq hieroglyphics -
- the Coptic alphabet, especially when used for religious in religious texts -
- and most Mongolian scripts, especially the "classical" alphabet, seen here running along the right edge of the picture:
My recent research was spurred on by a tiny fit of asemic writing that I used to kill time. See if you can see what's going on with this example:
Asemic writing is the same as writing, except that it has no real language content. It's an artistic practice that creates abstract forms that resemble text but isn't meant to be deciphered or even considered decipherable - it's pure scriptural invention, totally unbound from semantics. It's the kind of thing that someone with no interest in actually learning languages but a desire to see them come alive for aesthetic pleasure would love, and as such my one-time venture into it acted as a catalyst for me strolling the primrose path of Wikipedia's list of writing systems. If you scroll down that page past the undeciphered scripts there's a big section called "Other" that includes asemic writing and fictional writing systems (such as Tengwar from Tolkien's works and the script from Codex Seraphinianus, the greatest thing in the history of things) and near the top of that heap is the subject of today's article, phonetic alphabets.
Phonetic alphabets are designed to get around all the inconsistencies and unnecessarities of natural writing systems to better represent how languages sound, and one of these, the International Phonetic Alphabet (a bit too Eurocentric to be truly international, as most of it is based on the Latin and Greek alphabets), is very widely used for scholarly purposes. Another one familiar to American readers is Americanist phonetic notation, used largely for representing Native American languages that previously had no literate representation (with confusing letters such as dotless question marks and "l"s with tildes) as well as some Uralic languages in Northwest Russia and Finland. While both of these have proven useful in the right field the ones that caught my eye were attempts at revising or replacing the Latin alphabet for use with the English language, mostly created as part of a large movement in the 19th and early 20th centuries to reform English spelling. The way English is written is horribly inconsistent, bulky and confusing to new learners, its history littered with poorly-thought out reforms (such as the trend in Chaucer's time to spell and order words to better resemble Latin, such as the "s" in island and the rule to never end a sentence with a preposition) and tons of borrowed French, German and Spanish words. For spelling reform to catch on normal writers have to care about the difficulties in writing their own language and make a conscious effort to change their own writing practices for dubious practical gains, and considering how apathetic most Americans are about stuff like linguistics you can guess how excited the average 'Merican was about relearning how to write. While none of these proposed reforms were implemented on a mass scale a few ideas did stick, such as a half-successful effort to simplify -ck to -c, such as with the words magic (from magick) and tonic (from tonick). More than half of all the English spelling reforms were simply attempts to use the usual Latin alphabet in a simpler, more consistent way, but many others identified an inherent problem with the Latin alphabet, its inherent inability to accurately represent English sounds. How many different vowels do we use the latter "a" for? What about the inconsistent use of the letter "c"? Why did we keep the letter "q" at all if there's not one instance of its use without "u" right after it in an English word? Wouldn't it be nice if English had its own alphabet, tailor-made for our sounds and guaranteed to be consistent and easy? My thoughts exactly. (Though if this sounds like a bit too much for a foreigner to handle, think again: this excellent article by the award-winning Sci Fi writer Ted Chiang goes over how colossally difficult it is to learn written Chinese with any kind of speed.)
Enter supposed salvation from three wildly different but equally unlikely sources: Benjamin Franklin, Brigham Young and George Bernard Shaw. I'm just as shocked as you how those three people could make it into an English sentence that wasn't "here's three famous people who spoke English:..." and the stories behind their alphabets are just as fascinating as the scripts themselves. Part 1 of this article aims to examine all three of them to see if they hold water or were crummy from the get go, and in order to make both parts of this article palatable I'll try to be as George Plimpton-esque as possible, detailing my failures as much, or more, as my accomplishments and actually relevant information.
The oldest of these, old enough to predate the major reforms of the 19th century, is Benjamin Franklin's, created in 1768 in his essay A Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling. Rather than entirely replace the Latin alphabet Franklin opted to reassign and remove letters as he saw fit and augment them with letters borrowed from the Greek alphabet and some new graphemes that can be as hard to write as they are unappealing. Personally, I can't stand it. Just look at this:
Positively awful. One of the most obvious ways to reform spelling is to remove the need for doubled letters, as English doesn't have varying lengths in the same way that Finnish does and they mostly serve to make words longer and bulkier. Franklin's "solutions" to vowel inconsistencies add as many doubled letters as they remove and the additions from the Greek alphabet do little except make the whole thing seem derivative and eccentric, which is exactly what it is. Click the link to the article and you'll see a grapheme missing from here, a ligature of "a" and "u" for the "aw" sound that looks almost impossible to accurately write in longhand. I'll get to the good parts later but for now you can feast your eyes on my attempts to write in this nonsense. I decided to do test drives on the three most distinctive scripts using a pair of moderate-length paragraphs of quotation, and for the sake of ease of scrolling I'll only post the originals once. Because of how bulky the letter-to-sound charts are I haven't included them here; I suggest opening the articles on the alphabets in a different window so you can look back and forth. Here's the first paragraph I used, and you might notice something a little off with it:
No, you're eyes aren't failing, that really is what that looks like. When I started working on this article I was writing in the dead of night and mistakenly used a blue colored pencil of an unusually soft quality, so not only was it unnecessarily hard to write the first page it doesn't scan well, either. You can blow any of the images up by clicking on them and I guarantee that less than half of the transcriptions are written using that pencil. In fact, that's so unreadable I'm going to show it as it appears typed:
Much better. Franklin's alphabet was actually the last one I tested, long after the other two, and so I used a proper pencil for a script that might not be worth writing in:
While some things turned out fine the result is a bit less than compelling. This example has plenty of doubled vowels as per Franklin's resistance to making different letters for different versions of the five basic vowels, such as the use of "ee" to represent "ay" as in "bay", a decision that never looks right no matter how much I see what he was thinking. This also results in an overuse of the short "o" combo letter of "c" and a dotless "i" and other awkward choices, some of them due to how different English pronunciation was in the Colonies in the 18th century as compared to now. For example, Franklin bothers to distinguish "w" and "wh", marking the latter as "hu", and the minority usage of that sound today makes trying to write using the alphabet as a modern American English speaker more difficult that it needs to be. Let's take another example:
- and most Mongolian scripts, especially the "classical" alphabet, seen here running along the right edge of the picture:
My recent research was spurred on by a tiny fit of asemic writing that I used to kill time. See if you can see what's going on with this example:
Asemic writing is the same as writing, except that it has no real language content. It's an artistic practice that creates abstract forms that resemble text but isn't meant to be deciphered or even considered decipherable - it's pure scriptural invention, totally unbound from semantics. It's the kind of thing that someone with no interest in actually learning languages but a desire to see them come alive for aesthetic pleasure would love, and as such my one-time venture into it acted as a catalyst for me strolling the primrose path of Wikipedia's list of writing systems. If you scroll down that page past the undeciphered scripts there's a big section called "Other" that includes asemic writing and fictional writing systems (such as Tengwar from Tolkien's works and the script from Codex Seraphinianus, the greatest thing in the history of things) and near the top of that heap is the subject of today's article, phonetic alphabets.
Phonetic alphabets are designed to get around all the inconsistencies and unnecessarities of natural writing systems to better represent how languages sound, and one of these, the International Phonetic Alphabet (a bit too Eurocentric to be truly international, as most of it is based on the Latin and Greek alphabets), is very widely used for scholarly purposes. Another one familiar to American readers is Americanist phonetic notation, used largely for representing Native American languages that previously had no literate representation (with confusing letters such as dotless question marks and "l"s with tildes) as well as some Uralic languages in Northwest Russia and Finland. While both of these have proven useful in the right field the ones that caught my eye were attempts at revising or replacing the Latin alphabet for use with the English language, mostly created as part of a large movement in the 19th and early 20th centuries to reform English spelling. The way English is written is horribly inconsistent, bulky and confusing to new learners, its history littered with poorly-thought out reforms (such as the trend in Chaucer's time to spell and order words to better resemble Latin, such as the "s" in island and the rule to never end a sentence with a preposition) and tons of borrowed French, German and Spanish words. For spelling reform to catch on normal writers have to care about the difficulties in writing their own language and make a conscious effort to change their own writing practices for dubious practical gains, and considering how apathetic most Americans are about stuff like linguistics you can guess how excited the average 'Merican was about relearning how to write. While none of these proposed reforms were implemented on a mass scale a few ideas did stick, such as a half-successful effort to simplify -ck to -c, such as with the words magic (from magick) and tonic (from tonick). More than half of all the English spelling reforms were simply attempts to use the usual Latin alphabet in a simpler, more consistent way, but many others identified an inherent problem with the Latin alphabet, its inherent inability to accurately represent English sounds. How many different vowels do we use the latter "a" for? What about the inconsistent use of the letter "c"? Why did we keep the letter "q" at all if there's not one instance of its use without "u" right after it in an English word? Wouldn't it be nice if English had its own alphabet, tailor-made for our sounds and guaranteed to be consistent and easy? My thoughts exactly. (Though if this sounds like a bit too much for a foreigner to handle, think again: this excellent article by the award-winning Sci Fi writer Ted Chiang goes over how colossally difficult it is to learn written Chinese with any kind of speed.)
Enter supposed salvation from three wildly different but equally unlikely sources: Benjamin Franklin, Brigham Young and George Bernard Shaw. I'm just as shocked as you how those three people could make it into an English sentence that wasn't "here's three famous people who spoke English:..." and the stories behind their alphabets are just as fascinating as the scripts themselves. Part 1 of this article aims to examine all three of them to see if they hold water or were crummy from the get go, and in order to make both parts of this article palatable I'll try to be as George Plimpton-esque as possible, detailing my failures as much, or more, as my accomplishments and actually relevant information.
The oldest of these, old enough to predate the major reforms of the 19th century, is Benjamin Franklin's, created in 1768 in his essay A Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling. Rather than entirely replace the Latin alphabet Franklin opted to reassign and remove letters as he saw fit and augment them with letters borrowed from the Greek alphabet and some new graphemes that can be as hard to write as they are unappealing. Personally, I can't stand it. Just look at this:
Positively awful. One of the most obvious ways to reform spelling is to remove the need for doubled letters, as English doesn't have varying lengths in the same way that Finnish does and they mostly serve to make words longer and bulkier. Franklin's "solutions" to vowel inconsistencies add as many doubled letters as they remove and the additions from the Greek alphabet do little except make the whole thing seem derivative and eccentric, which is exactly what it is. Click the link to the article and you'll see a grapheme missing from here, a ligature of "a" and "u" for the "aw" sound that looks almost impossible to accurately write in longhand. I'll get to the good parts later but for now you can feast your eyes on my attempts to write in this nonsense. I decided to do test drives on the three most distinctive scripts using a pair of moderate-length paragraphs of quotation, and for the sake of ease of scrolling I'll only post the originals once. Because of how bulky the letter-to-sound charts are I haven't included them here; I suggest opening the articles on the alphabets in a different window so you can look back and forth. Here's the first paragraph I used, and you might notice something a little off with it:
No, you're eyes aren't failing, that really is what that looks like. When I started working on this article I was writing in the dead of night and mistakenly used a blue colored pencil of an unusually soft quality, so not only was it unnecessarily hard to write the first page it doesn't scan well, either. You can blow any of the images up by clicking on them and I guarantee that less than half of the transcriptions are written using that pencil. In fact, that's so unreadable I'm going to show it as it appears typed:
Much better. Franklin's alphabet was actually the last one I tested, long after the other two, and so I used a proper pencil for a script that might not be worth writing in:
While some things turned out fine the result is a bit less than compelling. This example has plenty of doubled vowels as per Franklin's resistance to making different letters for different versions of the five basic vowels, such as the use of "ee" to represent "ay" as in "bay", a decision that never looks right no matter how much I see what he was thinking. This also results in an overuse of the short "o" combo letter of "c" and a dotless "i" and other awkward choices, some of them due to how different English pronunciation was in the Colonies in the 18th century as compared to now. For example, Franklin bothers to distinguish "w" and "wh", marking the latter as "hu", and the minority usage of that sound today makes trying to write using the alphabet as a modern American English speaker more difficult that it needs to be. Let's take another example:
Right off the bat there are too many "i"s. Seriously, how hard is it to have one letter for the "ee" sound? Also, "boy" should never have to be spelled with five letters. Vitriol aside there are some good things Franklin did, such as creating graphemes for the sounds "ng", voiced and unvoiced "th" and the unvoiced "sh". I know that I should have at least tried to get used to the "c-dotless i" for "oh" sound but it just never happened; there's just something wrong about having to make the "ow" sound with something that looks like "ciu". I'll also admit that when I was writing this I forgot the letters the least frequently as with the other two because of how similar the alphabet is to Latin. I think it's time that we just admit what we all now understand: not every invention of Franklin's was good. Benjamin Franklin was one of the greatest minds of the 18th century, co-engineering the United States and making pioneering advancements in a striking variety of scientific fields, ultimately inventing things such as bifocal lenses, the lightning rod and his own kind of glass harmonica. He was also a raging eccentric, and while eccentric renaissance men are my favorite kind of person it's safe to say that Franklin was a bit out of his depth. I probably don't have to tell you that this alphabet didn't make it much farther beyond the pages of Franklin's essay collections and I have to say that it's probably for the better.
The next alphabet chronologically is the Deseret alphabet (pronounced precisely as it says on the tin), and even explaining its name opens up vast and fascinating alleys of history, the end of which we can't get anywhere near to in this article. I had mentioned that Brigham Young had a hand in its creation, but that's not entirely true. The alphabet was created in the mid 19th century by the board of regents of the University of Deseret, now known as the University of Utah, as well as leaders in the LDS Church. In accordance with the fervent Mormonism of the alphabet's designers, the name of the alphabet and university comes from the Book of Mormon, supposedly the word for "honeybee" in an ancient language in Mormonism's sacred history. The project was undertaken largely to create an English alphabet that would be both accurate and simplifying so people learning the language from another writing system or a non-literate culture would be able to learn the writing system easier, a fitting goal as at the time a large number of Scandinavian immigrants were settling in Utah. While the project wasn't pitched as a religious exercise the practice of creating new writing systems for use in missionary activities has a long and dense history, including the adaptation of the above Mi'kmaq hieroglyphics by French missionaries - the image for that script is a depiction of the Lord's Prayer, one of the most translated bits of writing in the world. It's also just like early Mormons to want to invent a new writing system, as the whole point of settling in Utah so firmly as to build a university there was to create an autonomous Mormon state, and a "State of Deseret" was proposed without actually getting off the ground. The very individualist spirit of Mormonism in creating its own alternate history and interweaving Christianity with Colonies folk magic was the same thing that got them thrown out of New England in the first place, so it's easy to imagine the new script as being part of LDS nationalism. While one of the main architects, Parley P. Pratt, was an LDS leader, the man who made the biggest contribution was George D. Watt, the first person from the British Isles to be baptized Mormon and a professional stenographer and expert on shorthand. Unlike Benjamin Franklin, Deseret started with the right foot forward by being largely designed by someone with linguistic expertise, as well as having a committee to develop it rather than just one guy. Let's take a look:
Deseret's designers got the first step right in correctly identifying all the sounds in English common enough to need representation by a letter, resulting in an alphabet with 40 letters rather than the usual 26. This number wasn't reached by accident, as we'll see later, and help, as well as inspiration, might have been supplied by an earlier attempt at a new alphabet by fellow Mormon Michael H. Barton. Barton converted to Mormonism from Quakerism and ultimately would leave LDS for Shakerism, and in 1830, during his Mormon period, published "Something New", detailing his own phonetic alphabet and featuring all the sounds featured in Deseret. I'll be testing Barton's alphabet in a later, third article but as it made the least impression on people compared to the other three I forewent (is that how you say that?) testing it for now. The greater influence on Deseret, at least in terms of inspiring the act of its creation, was the Cherokee syllabary, invented by the Cherokee Sequoyah almost out of whole cloth and an immediate success among his people. Unlike the Barton alphabet and the Cherokee syllabary, Deseret does a great job at looking almost totally unlike the Latin alphabet both close up and far away. The letters all look like they were carefully designed, fitting as the alphabet went through three major revisions in its early years, though I agree with the script's contemporaneous critics in that the uppercase and lowercase (called majuscule and miniscule in linguistics) versions of the letters should've looked different enough from each other that people shouldn't have to totally rely on making the majuscule versions larger than the miniscule. The striking visual identity of each letter made it relatively easy for me to remember which one was which when trying to transcribe from memory, and the stockily florid feel of the script gives whatever is written a noble, official flavor, much like an ancient religious text***. While some letters, such as the letters for "n" and "l", resemble their Latin counterparts, Deseret does a good job of shaking up our associations of shapes with sounds as to further force the reader to reorganize how they construct words in their head to fit a more appropriate English text. The fact that the script is easy to read both close up and far away is more important than you think, as our brain accomplishes much of reading by guessing from cursory glances, and because of that the easier the letter identification the easier it is to read the script quickly. It's also easy to see how many fewer letters I had to use to get the sounds I needed, and this was before I found out the custom in writing Deseret to use single letters for words that sound exactly like the name of the letter, meaning that "the", "and" and "you" all get to be represented with one grapheme. Isn't it lovely when you create extra work for yourself by not reading the instructions?
Things aren't all milk and deseret pollen, though. A major omission from the alphabet is a representation for the "schwa" sound, the "u" in "but", a sound that is often arrived at by being lazy while pronouncing other vowels****. Their solution is to use whatever vowel letter closest resembles what it would sound like if the stress was on the schwa, as English speakers habitually change vowels in words usually spoken quickly when stressing components of it, and because different readers hear words differently there's no right answer and variations can be annoying to have to read. If you want a crash course in how Americans from the mid-19th century pronounced everyday words try reading the two Deseret readers from the 1860s (also read them because they're charming as all heckout). Some shapes are recycled via flipping and rotation but the pairs don't match to related sounds, such as the long "a" being a flip of the "v" and long "e" being a flip of "z". Some of the letters are hard to write, specifically "k" and "g" - I was never able to write it in a way that wasn't lopsided and disconnected at one end or another. The "g" is one that's hard to read, especially when the print is small, because of the bang-like curve inside of them; another one is the "ew" with its 45-degree cross in a circle. All that being said I was very happy with Deseret in writing and aesthetics, succeeding more in autonomy than the Cherokee syllabary it most closely resembles and making up for its shortcomings with little tricks and charm.
One of the most interesting resources I found on Deseret was a blog written by a former University of Utah student who was introduced to it briefly in his studies and later went on to work on Unicode, the programming structure that allows computers to render international scripts. In the first post he described that at a certain point in Unicode's development the programmers realized they would have to do a major overhaul, and long story short developers needed to choose a handful of scripts to create Unicode for that could sit in outer levels, beyond current support, for an indefinite period of time without getting too many people mad. Deseret was one of them, as well as Pollard, another script devised by a missionary. A third was the third major phonetic alphabet that I tackled and arguably the most famous: Shavian.
George Bernard Shaw wasn't at all opposed to writing English in a newer, simpler way. He frequently wrote in Pitman shorthand, knew Henry Sweet, the inventor of Current Shorthand, and during the 1920s and '30s served on the BBC's Advisory Committee on Spoken English which broadcast many examples of phonetic spelling. In his will, Shaw made arrangements for a campaign to make a new English alphabet that had at least 40 letters, was as phonetic as possible, and looked nothing like the Latin alphabet. Isaac Pitman, along with the Public Trustee, announced a worldwide competition to design the alphabet, which resulted in four winners, including Ronald Kingsley Read. Read was appointed to amalgamate the best candidates to create the new alphabet and Shavian was born. Let's see it in action:
Shavian is a marvel of simplicity and unity. Most every letter is paired, with consonants mostly paired by voiced and unvoiced, such as v and f, and these pairs are the same symbols rotated 180 degrees, giving the script an unparalleled internal logic. Each letter can be written with a single stroke and a very quick one at that, aside from the eight ligatures for vowel/r combinations and common combos like "yu", and at no point can I imagine anyone having trouble seeing details in these at any distance. Both Deseret and Shavian do a fine job at identifying the most common English sounds, though Shavian has an upper hand in that it has the schwa and clears up some of the long/short vowel confusion to better align with modern English. The ligatures for vowel/r combos were a brilliant idea, especially the "ur" sound that, as I've found with practice, occurs quite frequently in normal English. However, there is one major issue here, one that I'm sure reading practice would clear up but needs to be addressed...there is such a thing as a script being too simple. It's easy to see how much of a reference shorthand must have been on Shavian because the letters are often so simple that they become very easy to mix up. I found myself forgetting which letters were which way more with Shavian than with Deseret and even Franklin's alphabet. If you think I'm just a complaining simpleton, let me give you some context. Here's what I consider one of the worst scripts in the world, Ogham:
Used to write ancient Celtic languages, Ogham's notchpiles carved into tree-like lines are some of the easiest graphemes to misread, with one wrong line resulting in a hot mess. This is one of the least distinctive scripts I've ever seen and Shavian's pseudo-shorthand look strays a little too close to this for my comfort.
Another major writing change with Shavian is the lack of miniscule and majuscule letters, instead having "tall" and "deep" letters that are either above or below the normal line. As you can see in the examples I had a hard time getting used to it and occasionally tried starting lines with "capital" versions of the letters or had to respace everything mid-line. The solution to writing names was to have a "naming dot" precede them, as you can see in the attributions at the bottom of each paragraph. It's an interesting concept but I'll have to tackle the main problem with it in a later article. It's certainly better than grammatical changes in some phonetic alphabets *COUGH*BARTON*COUGH* but we'll have to wait until the next article for the worst changes to Latin punctuation. The good news is that Shavian's successes outweigh its limitations for a refreshing shakeup of the Queen's English.
That above cover for the Shavian (or Shaw alphabet as it's called equally as often) edition of Shaw's Androcles and the Lion was published with funds from the Shaw trust, but because of that very fact it was the only book published in Shavian at the time, aside from a newsletter with fan-submitted Shavian content. That's a pretty pitiful amount of exposure for a movement to transform the written face of a language spoken by billions, though at four books, newspaper articles, a coin, a tombstone and unpublished material Deseret wasn't that much more exposed, despite the best efforts of the regents of the University of Deseret. A major roadblock in publishing material in these alphabets is the practicalities of typesetting before the computer age. Creating all those letter tiles and hiring people to painstakingly set type in an alphabet they might not fully understand, all on top of hiring people to transliterate book-length bodies of English into alphabets with different "experts" arguing over spelling was both unaffordable and headache-inducing at the time. The good news is that, now with computer software like Unicode it's way easier to create typeset documents in all the scripts you can think of, and as such there are Ebook solutions to your spelling nightmares, though mostly in Deseret as part of a thriving Deseret Alphabet Classics series. One book that you can find in both alphabets is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, created by the fantastic publisher Evertype, a specialist in using digital tech to publish books in minority and constructed languages and scripts. Alice has been used by the publisher as a platform for publishing in dozens of obscure languages and alphabets, including Shona, Lombardy and Lingwa de Planeta. Though skimming of the Deseret Alice revealed many inconsistencies and flat-out errors its great to see so much work put into such a niche practice. Perusing those various Alices also brought an Ewellic edition to the surface, and one thought crossed my mind - what in the Sam H-I-Double-Hockeysticks is Ewellic?!
...stick around for the next part to find out.
~PNK
*...wait, shit.
**Fun fact: if you put this into Google translate you'll resent me for having to do so.
***Prank idea: carve a quote in Deseret into a large rock and claim it's a thousands-ish-year-old artifact from a lost civilization.
****Uh thuhsuhnd yuhrs fruhm nuhw uhll Uhngluhsh wuhrds wuhll buh schwuhs bruhkuhn uhp buh cuhnsuhnuhnts. (A thousand years from now all English words will be schwas broken up by consonants)
The next alphabet chronologically is the Deseret alphabet (pronounced precisely as it says on the tin), and even explaining its name opens up vast and fascinating alleys of history, the end of which we can't get anywhere near to in this article. I had mentioned that Brigham Young had a hand in its creation, but that's not entirely true. The alphabet was created in the mid 19th century by the board of regents of the University of Deseret, now known as the University of Utah, as well as leaders in the LDS Church. In accordance with the fervent Mormonism of the alphabet's designers, the name of the alphabet and university comes from the Book of Mormon, supposedly the word for "honeybee" in an ancient language in Mormonism's sacred history. The project was undertaken largely to create an English alphabet that would be both accurate and simplifying so people learning the language from another writing system or a non-literate culture would be able to learn the writing system easier, a fitting goal as at the time a large number of Scandinavian immigrants were settling in Utah. While the project wasn't pitched as a religious exercise the practice of creating new writing systems for use in missionary activities has a long and dense history, including the adaptation of the above Mi'kmaq hieroglyphics by French missionaries - the image for that script is a depiction of the Lord's Prayer, one of the most translated bits of writing in the world. It's also just like early Mormons to want to invent a new writing system, as the whole point of settling in Utah so firmly as to build a university there was to create an autonomous Mormon state, and a "State of Deseret" was proposed without actually getting off the ground. The very individualist spirit of Mormonism in creating its own alternate history and interweaving Christianity with Colonies folk magic was the same thing that got them thrown out of New England in the first place, so it's easy to imagine the new script as being part of LDS nationalism. While one of the main architects, Parley P. Pratt, was an LDS leader, the man who made the biggest contribution was George D. Watt, the first person from the British Isles to be baptized Mormon and a professional stenographer and expert on shorthand. Unlike Benjamin Franklin, Deseret started with the right foot forward by being largely designed by someone with linguistic expertise, as well as having a committee to develop it rather than just one guy. Let's take a look:
(Shadow of the Vampire)
(Carlin, which is hilarious to write in a Mormon-designed alphabet)
Deseret's designers got the first step right in correctly identifying all the sounds in English common enough to need representation by a letter, resulting in an alphabet with 40 letters rather than the usual 26. This number wasn't reached by accident, as we'll see later, and help, as well as inspiration, might have been supplied by an earlier attempt at a new alphabet by fellow Mormon Michael H. Barton. Barton converted to Mormonism from Quakerism and ultimately would leave LDS for Shakerism, and in 1830, during his Mormon period, published "Something New", detailing his own phonetic alphabet and featuring all the sounds featured in Deseret. I'll be testing Barton's alphabet in a later, third article but as it made the least impression on people compared to the other three I forewent (is that how you say that?) testing it for now. The greater influence on Deseret, at least in terms of inspiring the act of its creation, was the Cherokee syllabary, invented by the Cherokee Sequoyah almost out of whole cloth and an immediate success among his people. Unlike the Barton alphabet and the Cherokee syllabary, Deseret does a great job at looking almost totally unlike the Latin alphabet both close up and far away. The letters all look like they were carefully designed, fitting as the alphabet went through three major revisions in its early years, though I agree with the script's contemporaneous critics in that the uppercase and lowercase (called majuscule and miniscule in linguistics) versions of the letters should've looked different enough from each other that people shouldn't have to totally rely on making the majuscule versions larger than the miniscule. The striking visual identity of each letter made it relatively easy for me to remember which one was which when trying to transcribe from memory, and the stockily florid feel of the script gives whatever is written a noble, official flavor, much like an ancient religious text***. While some letters, such as the letters for "n" and "l", resemble their Latin counterparts, Deseret does a good job of shaking up our associations of shapes with sounds as to further force the reader to reorganize how they construct words in their head to fit a more appropriate English text. The fact that the script is easy to read both close up and far away is more important than you think, as our brain accomplishes much of reading by guessing from cursory glances, and because of that the easier the letter identification the easier it is to read the script quickly. It's also easy to see how many fewer letters I had to use to get the sounds I needed, and this was before I found out the custom in writing Deseret to use single letters for words that sound exactly like the name of the letter, meaning that "the", "and" and "you" all get to be represented with one grapheme. Isn't it lovely when you create extra work for yourself by not reading the instructions?
Things aren't all milk and deseret pollen, though. A major omission from the alphabet is a representation for the "schwa" sound, the "u" in "but", a sound that is often arrived at by being lazy while pronouncing other vowels****. Their solution is to use whatever vowel letter closest resembles what it would sound like if the stress was on the schwa, as English speakers habitually change vowels in words usually spoken quickly when stressing components of it, and because different readers hear words differently there's no right answer and variations can be annoying to have to read. If you want a crash course in how Americans from the mid-19th century pronounced everyday words try reading the two Deseret readers from the 1860s (also read them because they're charming as all heckout). Some shapes are recycled via flipping and rotation but the pairs don't match to related sounds, such as the long "a" being a flip of the "v" and long "e" being a flip of "z". Some of the letters are hard to write, specifically "k" and "g" - I was never able to write it in a way that wasn't lopsided and disconnected at one end or another. The "g" is one that's hard to read, especially when the print is small, because of the bang-like curve inside of them; another one is the "ew" with its 45-degree cross in a circle. All that being said I was very happy with Deseret in writing and aesthetics, succeeding more in autonomy than the Cherokee syllabary it most closely resembles and making up for its shortcomings with little tricks and charm.
One of the most interesting resources I found on Deseret was a blog written by a former University of Utah student who was introduced to it briefly in his studies and later went on to work on Unicode, the programming structure that allows computers to render international scripts. In the first post he described that at a certain point in Unicode's development the programmers realized they would have to do a major overhaul, and long story short developers needed to choose a handful of scripts to create Unicode for that could sit in outer levels, beyond current support, for an indefinite period of time without getting too many people mad. Deseret was one of them, as well as Pollard, another script devised by a missionary. A third was the third major phonetic alphabet that I tackled and arguably the most famous: Shavian.
George Bernard Shaw wasn't at all opposed to writing English in a newer, simpler way. He frequently wrote in Pitman shorthand, knew Henry Sweet, the inventor of Current Shorthand, and during the 1920s and '30s served on the BBC's Advisory Committee on Spoken English which broadcast many examples of phonetic spelling. In his will, Shaw made arrangements for a campaign to make a new English alphabet that had at least 40 letters, was as phonetic as possible, and looked nothing like the Latin alphabet. Isaac Pitman, along with the Public Trustee, announced a worldwide competition to design the alphabet, which resulted in four winners, including Ronald Kingsley Read. Read was appointed to amalgamate the best candidates to create the new alphabet and Shavian was born. Let's see it in action:
Shavian is a marvel of simplicity and unity. Most every letter is paired, with consonants mostly paired by voiced and unvoiced, such as v and f, and these pairs are the same symbols rotated 180 degrees, giving the script an unparalleled internal logic. Each letter can be written with a single stroke and a very quick one at that, aside from the eight ligatures for vowel/r combinations and common combos like "yu", and at no point can I imagine anyone having trouble seeing details in these at any distance. Both Deseret and Shavian do a fine job at identifying the most common English sounds, though Shavian has an upper hand in that it has the schwa and clears up some of the long/short vowel confusion to better align with modern English. The ligatures for vowel/r combos were a brilliant idea, especially the "ur" sound that, as I've found with practice, occurs quite frequently in normal English. However, there is one major issue here, one that I'm sure reading practice would clear up but needs to be addressed...there is such a thing as a script being too simple. It's easy to see how much of a reference shorthand must have been on Shavian because the letters are often so simple that they become very easy to mix up. I found myself forgetting which letters were which way more with Shavian than with Deseret and even Franklin's alphabet. If you think I'm just a complaining simpleton, let me give you some context. Here's what I consider one of the worst scripts in the world, Ogham:
Used to write ancient Celtic languages, Ogham's notchpiles carved into tree-like lines are some of the easiest graphemes to misread, with one wrong line resulting in a hot mess. This is one of the least distinctive scripts I've ever seen and Shavian's pseudo-shorthand look strays a little too close to this for my comfort.
Another major writing change with Shavian is the lack of miniscule and majuscule letters, instead having "tall" and "deep" letters that are either above or below the normal line. As you can see in the examples I had a hard time getting used to it and occasionally tried starting lines with "capital" versions of the letters or had to respace everything mid-line. The solution to writing names was to have a "naming dot" precede them, as you can see in the attributions at the bottom of each paragraph. It's an interesting concept but I'll have to tackle the main problem with it in a later article. It's certainly better than grammatical changes in some phonetic alphabets *COUGH*BARTON*COUGH* but we'll have to wait until the next article for the worst changes to Latin punctuation. The good news is that Shavian's successes outweigh its limitations for a refreshing shakeup of the Queen's English.
That above cover for the Shavian (or Shaw alphabet as it's called equally as often) edition of Shaw's Androcles and the Lion was published with funds from the Shaw trust, but because of that very fact it was the only book published in Shavian at the time, aside from a newsletter with fan-submitted Shavian content. That's a pretty pitiful amount of exposure for a movement to transform the written face of a language spoken by billions, though at four books, newspaper articles, a coin, a tombstone and unpublished material Deseret wasn't that much more exposed, despite the best efforts of the regents of the University of Deseret. A major roadblock in publishing material in these alphabets is the practicalities of typesetting before the computer age. Creating all those letter tiles and hiring people to painstakingly set type in an alphabet they might not fully understand, all on top of hiring people to transliterate book-length bodies of English into alphabets with different "experts" arguing over spelling was both unaffordable and headache-inducing at the time. The good news is that, now with computer software like Unicode it's way easier to create typeset documents in all the scripts you can think of, and as such there are Ebook solutions to your spelling nightmares, though mostly in Deseret as part of a thriving Deseret Alphabet Classics series. One book that you can find in both alphabets is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, created by the fantastic publisher Evertype, a specialist in using digital tech to publish books in minority and constructed languages and scripts. Alice has been used by the publisher as a platform for publishing in dozens of obscure languages and alphabets, including Shona, Lombardy and Lingwa de Planeta. Though skimming of the Deseret Alice revealed many inconsistencies and flat-out errors its great to see so much work put into such a niche practice. Perusing those various Alices also brought an Ewellic edition to the surface, and one thought crossed my mind - what in the Sam H-I-Double-Hockeysticks is Ewellic?!
...stick around for the next part to find out.
~PNK
*...wait, shit.
**Fun fact: if you put this into Google translate you'll resent me for having to do so.
***Prank idea: carve a quote in Deseret into a large rock and claim it's a thousands-ish-year-old artifact from a lost civilization.
****Uh thuhsuhnd yuhrs fruhm nuhw uhll Uhngluhsh wuhrds wuhll buh schwuhs bruhkuhn uhp buh cuhnsuhnuhnts. (A thousand years from now all English words will be schwas broken up by consonants)
Thank you!
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