Deseret Alphabet
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
In case you are unfamiliar, in many languages, the language is written exactly as it is spoken. For example, in Spanish and Italian, words are written exactly as they are pronounced. If you can read the word, you can pronounce it though you might not know the meaning.
Children in English-speaking places will usually have to study "spelling" where they learn how to correctly spell words.
Deseret alphabet was pronounced exactly as it was written which shows which spoken accents the speakers had.
English to Deseret translator: https://www.2deseret.com/
Learning to read Deseret primer book: https://archive.org/details/deseretfirstbook00univ/page/n3/m...
Nope. Spanish is admittedly far more phonemic than English, but there are plenty of exceptions, eg. the letter "x". And of course Spanish writing completely ignores the huge dialectal variations in pronouncing "ll", "c", "z" etc.
But also, the page you've linked to is misleading - it says that Spanish B/V is [b] (bilabial plosive), while in practice it's [β] (bilabial fricative or approximant) in most positions, with [b] as allophone. The phoneme is conventionally written as /b/, yes, but that does not directly correspond to pronunciation.
Some regions still make that difference, at least senior people do. I had a language teacher from old Castille who sound her spelling of v and b very clearly. She made the distinction between 'll' and 'y' clear as well, with 'll' sounding as a modified 'l', a cross between 'li' and 'ye'.
Just wanted to point out that the variation of sound is not random, but with the sound tied to the letter. Also Spain has something that English does not, which is an official organisation studying the language and making official rules recognising how it's used at different contexts and zones.
However, English grammar is much simpler than Spanish grammar.
So true.
Learning Italian and Spanish as a native English speaker is daunting because of the sheer number of verb tenses and irregular verbs you must master:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_conjugation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conjugation
The other challenge is learning the correct gender for inanimate objects:
https://learnitalian.web.unc.edu/home/nounsarticlesadjective...).
Who would have guessed that a motorcycle is female:
https://www.webspanish.com/blog/spanish-lesson-se-dice-el-mo...
"A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."
See https://emmawilkin.com/blog/2020/2/17/a-rough-coated-dough-f...
This isn't exactly correct. We have all the same tenses, it's just that in English these tenses are more frequently created using separate words, rather than a modification to the infinitive verb. Since modifications to the infinitive verb may not work on all infinitive verbs, this results in more irregularities in Spanish.
For example, the future tense in English takes the infinitive verb ("to pay" or "to eat") and adds "will" before it ("I will pay", "They will eat").
In Spanish the future tense take the infinitive verb ("pagar" or "comer") and modifies the ending--but the endings are different, so they have to be modified differently--the results are similar but different enough to matter. And there are different conjugations for the subject as well. So:
I will pay => Pagaré They will eat => (Ellas|Ellos) comeran
If you know the future tense for "pay" in English, you can easily construct the future tense of any infinitive verb for any subject ("They will eat", "He will run", "You will go"). But knowing "Pagaré" teaches you nothing about how to conjugate even the same infinitive for a different subject, let alone other infinitives.
In general I don't believe it's true that every language has exactly the same tenses, I think they actually can vary.
Chinese, for example, has no tenses.
When it comes to counting tenses of languages, people disagree on how many there are. For example consider English. https://www.englishclub.com/grammar/verb-tenses.php offers 12. But as noted there, it can be argued that there really are only 6.
Spanish is usually said to have 16 tenses, but there is again some wiggle room. See https://www.busuu.com/en/spanish/tenses.
If you were very strict about only looking at the single word, English stays very simple (do=infinitive/present plural, does=present singular, doing=progressive, did=past, done=arguably not a tense because it's an adjective). If you look at it in this way, Spanish obviously has more tenses--they have six different variations of just the present tense, for example.
But that doesn't capture the whole story because English does have all those tenses, English just doesn't do it in one word. Notably, there's no future tense in the one-word variations, so nobody reasonably will argue that the above is all the tenses.
And that takes you to a complicated place because you can do multi-word variations in Spanish, too, and sometimes those are functionally the same (what's the difference between "voy a pagar" and "pagaré"?).
And if you start allowing for multiple-word tenses, then there's a virtually unlimited number of constructions possible, and any limitation you could place on this is completely subjective. For example, your link doesn't list "I will have had been doing" as a tense, but it's obviously a grammatically correct construction with a real use--the only reason for not including it is a subjective judgment that it's too uncommon.
And critically, you can do all of those in both languages, it's just a matter of how many words and how awkward/uncommon the construction will be. The different structures of the languages lead one toward preferring certain structures ("pagaré" over "voy a pagar" in Spanish, while one would likely say "I'll pay" in English because there's no one-word option). But to represent these as different tenses is pretty subjective and maybe a bit silly.
The one thing I'm aware of that Spanish can do that English can't is communicate formality with a conjugation, i.e. "tú" form versus "usted" form, but I'd argue that's not a tense, because "tense" seems to be about the the temporatlity of the verb and that's a modification to accommodate the formality of the subject of the sentence.
But would you think they are, that if you can communicate the same things about temporality in all languages, then that means "all languages have the same tenses"? I guess that may indeed be a semantic argument on what it means to "have a tense", but that seems an idiosyncratic meaning of "tense" to me.
But then, what do you do with the simple non-controversial fact that Spanish has both past imperfect and past preterite, and English does not? Sure you can use a "past progressive" construction in English like "was walking" to, in some cases communicate the same or similar thing -- but you can say "estaba caminando" in Spanish too -- or you can instead, more commonly, say "caminaba". You have an extra choice in Spanish, an additional grammatical form with an additional shade of meaning, that does not exist in English. (and "caminaba" isn't always, or even usually, translated to English properly as "was walking", but could probably more often just be "walked" too.)
This seem to be a pretty clear counter-example to the claim that all languages have the same tenses? A simple one, with an everyday construction, from a common language. (for all languages, I'd want to look at some obscure ones too!). Now, it doesn't mean that "caminaba" is untranslateable to English, there are several differnet ways you might translate it depending on context, to try to get the point across more or less ("was walking", "used to walk", "Back then I would walk", etc, and in many cases though just "walked" is fine, "I walked to work everyday") -- which is true of all translation. But this gets back to--are you actually just trying to say that all languages can express the same ideas? That's also a somewhat controversial claim, but, I think, an entirely different and broader one than "all languages have the same tenses", but can be true even if all languages don't have the same tenses.
Eh... if I had to make a claim to argue for I'd just claim that tense isn't really a clear communication of an idea that actually exists. If it's about conjugating words, then English has, what, 3 tenses (do, did, doing)? If it's about temporality, English has virtually infinite tenses, although at some point they become unwieldy ("will have had been going to have been doing"?).
> But then, what do you do with the simple non-controversial fact that Spanish has both past imperfect and past preterite, and English does not? Sure you can use a "past progressive" construction in English like "was walking" to, in some cases communicate the same or similar thing -- but you can say "estaba caminando" in Spanish too -- or you can instead, more commonly, say "caminaba". You have an extra choice in Spanish, an additional grammatical form with an additional shade of meaning, that does not exist in English. (and "caminaba" isn't always, or even usually, translated to English properly as "was walking", but could probably more often just be "walked" too.)
Sure, but again, doesn't English have that sort of thing? Isn't there a subtle difference between "I will pay" and "I'm going to pay", even though pretty much everything I've read would list these both as the future tense? Is that subtle difference really a "tense" or is it just that there's a separate word?
But that said, the fact that you CAN communicate something, doesn't mean that you did it through a tense. I already pointed you at Chinese, which has NO verb conjugation at all, and therefore is often claimed to have no tenses. What does it do instead? It has words for things like past, yesterday, tomorrow, and so on. Once one of those has been used, this is a context that is assumed to continue holding through your conversation until someone says something else. Then you continue in that new context with no grammatical cues to remind you of the timeframe under discussion.
See https://www.thoughtco.com/mandarin-timeframes-2279615 for a more detailed explanation of how this actually works in practice. But it is clear that treatment of time is grammatically different as you go across languages.
But if that's a claim that Chinese has no tenses, I guess it somewhat comes down to what you consider a tense, then. Because if it's just about forms of a verb, I'd have to say that English has no future tense, for example, leaving us with probably... three tenses? Present (do), past (did), progressive (doing).
But nothing I've read treats tense that way.
To me a tense is the way you normally and automatically construct the grammar of a sentence to implicitly convey a specific idea about time. Without saying it explicitly. So "I went to the store", "I went to the store yesterday", and "I went to the store last week" are all the same tense. Because you've communicated "past" through the grammar without having explicitly said it. And it is clearly different than "I am going to the store" or "I will go to the store".
The Chinese form, by contrast, all look like, "I go to store". And the words saying whether it was somewhere in the past, yesterday, last week, now, or some time in the future need be nowhere in the sentence. It is enough that they were explicitly said at some point.
And this is specifically something that Chinese people struggle with in English. You constantly will catch them making mistakes like, "I go to store yesterday." Because the idea of conveying time with grammar is as foreign to them as the idea that objects have gender is to English speakers.
It is like some form of patriotism?
Genders and verb tenses are hard if you choose to see them as that. However, what I do is treat the gender part of the word I'm learning. The same thing with learning Chinese and seeing that the tone is part of the word and shouldn't be seen as separate.
Literally any language you chose to pick up a book on grammar will feel daunting. Realistically, you don't need to "learn" most of it. If you keep learning how to speak the language the grammar will come naturally.
Think about it like this, Japanese is described as one of the harder languages to pick up and learn. However, does a Japanese speaker automatically find it easier to learn Spanish because that's described as an easier language? I'm sure if they open a book on Spanish grammar they'll also feel completely overwhelmed.
Ok, so not 'written exactly as pronounced', but pretty close, especially compared to English.
But what human language does not have exceptions to the rule? Or irregular conjugations or forms?
>> ignores the huge dialectal variations
Most dialects could be considered separate languages with varying degrees of shared ancestry. For that reason, I am not including dialects in my generalization.
Orthography Write Read
----------- ---------- ----------
ar 84.3 ± 0.8 99.4 ± 0.3
br 80.6 ± 0.6 77.2 ± 1.6
de 69.1 ± 1.0 78.0 ± 1.5
en 36.1 ± 1.5 31.1 ± 1.3
eo 99.3 ± 0.2 99.7 ± 0.1
es 66.9 ± 2.0 85.3 ± 1.3
fi 97.7 ± 0.3 92.3 ± 0.8
fr 28.0 ± 1.4 79.6 ± 1.7
it 94.5 ± 0.8 71.6 ± 0.9
ko 81.9 ± 1.0 97.5 ± 0.5
nl 72.9 ± 1.7 55.7 ± 2.2
pt 75.8 ± 1.0 82.4 ± 0.9
ru 41.3 ± 1.6 97.2 ± 0.5
sh 99.2 ± 0.3 99.3 ± 0.3
tr 95.4 ± 0.7 95.9 ± 0.6
zh 19.9 ± 1.4 78.7 ± 0.9
It seems to be mainly about whether the widely adopted orthography was specifically designed with phonemicity in mind, and whether enough time has passed since then for the pronunciation to diverge (e.g. note Korean - Hangeul was perfectly phonemic when originally designed, but it isn't anymore after >500 years of language evolution). Modern orthographies are more likely to stick for longer though because speech is much more uniform today thanks to universal education and mass media.
It also helps when the government steps in. Serbo-Croatian is this way thanks to the efforts of Vuk Karadžić and Ljudevit Gaj being adopted by the corresponding ethnostates as official. Turkish Latin orthography was literally designed by committee to pursue a political goal, and then heavily enforced top-down.
So it's not really about "phonemic" in the traditional sense where graphemes directly correspond to phonemes. The more accurate description of the generalized metric is "how unambiguously graphemes map to sounds", which is still meaningful even if the mapping is very far from 1:1 as is the case for Chinese. Also, if I understand correctly given what CEDICT is, they basically used pinyin as phonemic transcription (instead of IPA, like for other languages) - i.e. as output.
But then again, actual alphabets do this kind of thing too. E.g. Belarusian orthography is almost completely unambiguous (Taraskevica might actually be completely unambiguous even?), but you have quirks like e.g. "я" meaning either /ja/ or /ʲa/ depending on the preceding character, whereas /a/ in other contexts uses a completely different letter "а"; I believe this would score as high as Serbo-Croatian by their metric, although strictly speaking it's less phonemic, because the mapping is not 1:1. So if Chinese characters generally have consistent pronunciations, it ought to score relatively high for reading.
Another possible explanation: perhaps their ANN model was incapable of working across word boundaries? (The "n" in "en Bolivia" is pronounced like "m": it's perfectly regular and a simple rule but you do have to look beyond the current word.)
EDIT: When I write "exactly as it's written" I mean, of course, that you compute the pronunciation from the spelling by applying some simple rules. For example, B and V are pronounced the same way, and that way depends on the context, but the rules are very simple: they can be expressed in a few hundred words. Also, I don't consider an overly formal pronunciation to be "incorrect" for the purposes of this discussion!
It's still far, far better than English.
Also sometimes an s will be written as a z. I found some workers' markings under the paint in my bathroom that said "de el pizo" (from the floor), with floor (piso) misspelled.
Still, Spanish is better then English about this by a country mile.
The problem with these efforts is that they're usually a "correct" spelling for a specific accent/dialect of English -- typically based on the American midwest accent used on news broadcasts. However, English, being a global language has an almost uncountable number of minor accents and dialects which won't conform to a standard phonetic spelling.
Still, these are fun exercises and do point to the absurdity of English orthography.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot%E2%80%93caught_merger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father%E2%80%93bother_merger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap%E2%80%93bath_split
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lot%E2%80%93cloth_split
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Englis...
That aside, it would make more sense to take the Latin alphabet as a base, and only add enough new letters to cover what's missing. And if you use diacritics to derive new letters, it's possible to come up with something that can reflect pronunciation accurately in different dialects (using different diacritics where the same words are pronounced differently) while remaining broadly readable across those dialects if diacritics are simply ignored.
As I stated in the comments below:
"Most dialects could be considered separate languages with varying degrees of shared ancestry. For that reason, I am not including dialects in my generalization."
So, to be more precise, the Deseret alphabet was phoenetically correct for the English spoken by the Utah settlers circa 1850 to 1870.
- Language never changes. Okay, well, it used to change constantly, but that stops starting now!
- The way we talk is obviously correct and will always be correct, and everyone else is wrong.
But this is a cool alphabet to know if you really need to write a message to a mid-19th-century Utah settler. Oh, wait, they wouldn't be able to read it either. But I'm sure it made Brigham Young feel superior to everyone else, which was its actual purpose all along.
The language our script most suits is Italian. It's way more regular than Spanish, though your point "you can pronounce it" (from reading alone) is an important one - it might be tricky in French or Spanish or German to figure out exactly how to spell a word, but most kids can pronounce any written word correctly after their first year of reading. Sometimes learning where to stress Greek/Latin-based words can be a bit difficult to figure out, but follows a pattern that is easily picked up.
And schools have spelling tests to check kids' progress, even if they don't make it into a big competitive event.
I don't know about that... The pronunciation of 'B' and 'V' varies depending on their position in the word; "conversación" is pronounced as "combersación," etc.
Constructing your own alphabet to resembles the alphabets of the religion(s) you establish your legitimacy via is a savvy political move.
This sounds critical, when it’s not meant to be. Well, historically critical, in that I feel like it aligns with the theory mentioned above.
A lot of Mormon History is a study of political savvy and lack thereof, and I will never not be fascinated by it.
The observation about legitimacy was not meant to be (uniquely) derogatory: almost every religion or organized movement appeals to some historically accepted source of authority. Compare neoclassical architecture, etc.
The main impression I get from it is that shorthand scripts like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitman_shorthand are probably underappreciated now as an inspiration.
Also mummies. And hieroglyphics. That was quite an intrigue then. (It’s a fascinating period, especially from the southwest perspective. The civil war barely affected the region. Except for a few interesting historical things about Utah statehood and actual cowboys.)
The thing is. Simplified pronunciation was a movement at the time of Brigham Young and later, when most of Salt Lake City actually developed these traditions.
Heck (my people, I’m a descendant of some of the people who built it) still had vineyards and distilleries until the early 20th century. The word of wisdom came out a bit before then!
This is really interesting, I wonder if anyone has tried to make new English alphabets that focus on making words easy to distinguish. I guess anyone making anew font is at least considering this point
Diacritical marks were added to the alphabet to support foreign words that the standard alphabet couldn't support.
* There's no schwa, which the article discusses.
* I don't see the long vowel of "nurse" in the list. Presumably they wrote their pronunciation of that word with four letters. It's three phonemes in RP (of course there's no R pronounced).
* Three diphthongs (the sounds in "pier", "pair" and "poor") are missing. Presumably they wrote their pronunciations of those words with three letters in each (rather than P plus a diphthong, no R unless the following word starts with a vowel).
* They have a diphthong for the sound of "mule" so that word has three letters. I'd think of it as four phonemes: /mju:l/.
* A couple of RP diphthongs (the sounds in "ale" and "ope") are listed as long vowels. Fair enough: they're simple vowels in some English dialects.
One could argue that the Mormon church has an "academia complex" of many interesting dimensions. Or an extreme love/hate tendency with learning and academic progress that is never quite reconciled.
One of the most fascinating dimensions to me is the sheer number of active-Mormon academics who make a quiet decision to become covert agents working against the leadership of the church. (The September Six were a prominent example of this and other issues in the academic space too)
When my wife and I were considering whether to remain active (both of us born into the religion) and after I had left the local stake leadership at my own will, my wife corresponded with a prominent Mormon academic. Feeling some natural hesitation at the very least due to the tremendous cost to our family and friend relationships, and more (the impact here has been awful).
This academic, well-known to church members, eventually admitted rather bluntly that they saw themselves as one who helped Mormons see through the false stories told by church leaders.
We couldn't believe what we were reading in these messages, after the initial formalities were over and after my wife continued pushing back from the "but you, personally, genuinely don't see a problem with..." angle. But over time I've come to realize that academia kind of has a unique upper hand in the sense that it is a separate, objective social structure with its own support and language system.
So, as long as one doesn't torpedo one's own job directly, church academics can have arguably-deep access to changing minds over time. (It was clearly a bit of an intoxicating concept to the person in question, I think also given their popularity)
It does require listeners to pay a lot of attention to nuance however, so the filtering effect is unfortunately strong compared to people on the more orthodox or fundamentalist side who speak passion-first, as direct as possible, from a position of stubborn belief despite others' positions and experiences.
My observation of academics-oriented personalities within the local church (whether actually academic by profession or not) was that they tended to be almost randomly punished for simply existing. In my mind this was pretty clearly related to the question of whether an individual tended to contribute to the day-to-day order of things with consistent structural adherence & adjustment, or whether they rather did this at a theoretical level, more clearly removed from the little picture. The former being more in line with the preferred personality of the church organization. Ergo, punishment for being who they were.
There's much more I could say about it, but it's really quite a fascinating topic in its way.
And it's not uncommon as an active member to come across artifacts similar to the alphabet in question, which seem really cool, then you find they were in effect abandoned by very intellectual people who are no longer Mormon. That was always a bit awkward as an active Mormon...but, you know how it is with these intellectuals! "When they are learned they think they are wise"...
that's pretty short for a "heyday," IMO.