Deseret: An Alphabet from the Desert
Saturday, November 28th, 2009 10:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flwydIn case you'd run out of weird facts about Mormons, here's one I didn't know: they invented Deseret, their own phonetic alphabet for English. The name Deseret comes from the word for "honeybee"[1] in the Book of Mormon and was the name of the proposed and de facto Mormon state that covers the present day locations of Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Reno, Salt Lake City, and Grand Junction.
Anyway, here's an attempt at my name in Deseret. There's a good chance your browser won't display it properly[2], but the font is part of MacOS X's default set.
๐๐๐ฏ๐๐ฌ๐ ๐๐ป๐ฌ๐
See also the Shavian alphabet (named for George Bernard Shaw), with long/short and voiced/unvoiced pairs as translations of a single glyph. My Shavian name is
ยท๐๐ฎ๐ง๐๐น ยท๐๐๐ด๐ฏ
[1] In Mormonism, honeybees are used as a model of a proper society. Lots of people busy as a bee, all in service of the central hive. Not knowing this association, I was excited about the prospect of a vibrant local honey industry when I visited the beehive state a few years ago. It turns out that the state is not covered in apiaries.
[2] To test your browser's display of most Indo-European scripts, try this page. Deseret and Shavian are not included, but non-Latin scripts are organized into alphabets with some phonetic hints.
Anyway, here's an attempt at my name in Deseret. There's a good chance your browser won't display it properly[2], but the font is part of MacOS X's default set.
๐๐๐ฏ๐๐ฌ๐ ๐๐ป๐ฌ๐
See also the Shavian alphabet (named for George Bernard Shaw), with long/short and voiced/unvoiced pairs as translations of a single glyph. My Shavian name is
ยท๐๐ฎ๐ง๐๐น ยท๐๐๐ด๐ฏ
[1] In Mormonism, honeybees are used as a model of a proper society. Lots of people busy as a bee, all in service of the central hive. Not knowing this association, I was excited about the prospect of a vibrant local honey industry when I visited the beehive state a few years ago. It turns out that the state is not covered in apiaries.
[2] To test your browser's display of most Indo-European scripts, try this page. Deseret and Shavian are not included, but non-Latin scripts are organized into alphabets with some phonetic hints.
