Deseret Alphabet

Font-maker, Font-maker, Make Me a Font

2011-12-14T09:53:00.001-08:00

One of my long-term gripes about the Deseret Alphabet is that we seem to be stuck with the letter-forms created in the mid-19th century. Even worse, almost everybody simply recreates the exact glyphs from the font used to print the four books in the 1860’s. Now, the Church commissioned the best font it could afford, but given the state of American typography at the time, the result is somewhat infelicitous.

There are two big gripes with the “standard” shapes of the Deseret Alphabet letters.

Gripe One: There are no ascenders and descenders. It turns out that we don’t really read by looking at word shapes but by actually recognizing letters—but ascenders and descenders are probably a big part of how we distinguish letters when reading. In any event, TYPING IN SOMETHING THAT LOOKS LIKE ALL CAPS FOR ANY LENGTH OF TIME IS RATHER TIRING FOR LATIN-TRAINED READERS.

Gripe Two: The lower-case letters are just smaller versions of the upper-case letters.

Back in the 1990’s, I did two Deseret Alphabet fonts. One (whose glyphs eventually became part of Apple Symbols) uses the exact glyphs from the 1860’s, and the other (which is available if you download Apple’s font tools) was created via an involved process using Metafont and still uses the basic shapes as before.

And as for the real typographers out there, the Hermann Zapfs and Jonathan Hoeflers and their colleagues, there is little interest in making a good-looking Deseret Alphabet font.

A colleague of mine had an excellent idea. Sit a calligrapher down (he suggested my wife), and have them copy the Deseret Alphabet over and over with a steel pen. As they do this repeatedly, they’ll start to change the glyphs in a natural sort of way, and eventually we might have something that actually looks organic. This, after all, is just a compressed version of what happened with the Latin script we all know and love.

My wife, however, does not have the time, and I don’t have any other calligraphers handy, so this past spring I did the next best thing and took the bull by the horns myself.

I’m no artist by any means, but over the years I have developed a certain level of skill in creating glyphs in Font Lab Studio using bits and pieces of other glyphs. I thought I’d try the same here. I therefore started with a freely-available font, Computer Modern Unicode, with as huge a repertoire as I could find. The more glyphs there are with pieces I can use, the better for me. In particular, given the genealogy of the Deseret Alphabet, a full suite of Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic glyphs would probably supply me with everything I needed and look reasonably organic.

The results with CMU weren’t entirely satisfactory, so I tried again with a different font, this time DejaVu Sans. The results were somewhat better this time, but still not quite what I’d like. (It’s the font I used for the PDF of Isaac Asimov ’s short story “Youth.”) I made a third effort, therefore, with DejaVu Serif, and that seems to be the best of the bunch. It’s not 100% of the way there, however. My wife caught my proofing something I set with it and asked me what alphabet that was. When I said it was the DA, she said, “Oh, I should have known. The letters don’t look like they belong together.”

A couple of months ago, someone on the Deseret Alphabet group over at Yahoo! expressed an interest in seeing the Proclamation on the Family in the Deseret Alphabet, so I whipped up something and put it online. It’s available here.

The general reaction has been fairly positive, so it would be nice to make the font more freely available. Unfortunately, for various complicated reasons, I can’t do that right now. I can, however, describe the steps I used.

I therefore whipped up a quick spreadsheet with all the letters in the basic Deseret Alphabet in both Apple Symbols and the DejaVu Serif-derivative, and some notes as to how I made it. This is also online as a PDF. And while I was at it, I added a waterfall sheet illustrating the font.

Now if only I can finish proofing the book I set with this puppy…

Isaac Asimov in the Deseret Alphabet

2011-05-02T16:50:00.000-07:00

I've converted Isaac Asimov's short story "Youth" to the Deseret Alphabet in my usual haphazard way.

The plain text version is available, but at the moment it isn't being shared, so if you want it you'll have to ask first.

A PDF version is available at http://bit.ly/jNMlun. This uses a sans serif Deseret Alphabet font I made using Deja Vu as a starting point. I am trying four experiments with this font:

1) The line through the middle of the 𐐔 is removed, so it looks like a reversed Latin D.

2) The curl on 𐐏 is dropped, so it looks like a regular Latin V.

3) The curlicue inside 𐐃, 𐐍, and 𐐘 is turned into a dot, either inside the letter (for upper-case letters) or above it (for lower-case letters).

4) Some of the lower-case letters have had ascenders or descenders added.

I'm not entirely happy with the font. I think the spacing needs work and some of the lower-case letters were made by scaling upper-case letters, so they look a little thin.

As for the story, it's the only thing by Asimov in the public domain, or so Project Gutenberg thinks. I haven't proofed it yet, so it probably has misspellings galore. I'm going to revise my program to convert text to the Deseret Alphabet to try to get it to do a better job. When I do, I may or may not revise this.

The Tale of the Three Ahs

2011-04-28T11:06:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, there were three Ahs.

One Ah was named 𐐉. She could not be bothered with many of the things her father wanted, so she set off on her own, looking for a spot where she could be happy. In the end, she was lost.

One Ah was named 𐐃. Her fault was that there was naught she wanted from her father, and she also left, looking for a lord who could give her all she wanted. No word ever came back from her.

The third Ah was named 𐐂. She was her father’s favorite and herself wanted no part of her sisters’ unfiliality. Instead, she stayed with him in his cottage. Since she loved the arts, she spent her days creating beautiful things for them both to enjoy; and together they still are, happy and contented.

Enough, say I, is enough.

This whole “ah” business has been gnawing at me, so I decided to try to actually get it straight in my head. To start with, I took the title page of the Book of Mormon and wrote down all the words containing any of the three “ah” letters, 𐐂, 𐐃, and 𐐉. I then looked them up in Oxford New American Dictionary that comes with Mac OS X and Wiktionary to get both American and British pronunciations in IPA.

Let’s go through them in reverse alphabetical order. For each letter, I’ll list all the words, then their American pronunciations (Wiktionary first) and their British pronunciations (again, Wiktionary first). For some words, the dictionaries only gave the pronunciations of their roots.

𐐤𐐉𐐓 /nɑt/ |nɑt| /nɒt/ |nɒt|

𐐉𐐚 /ʌv/ |əv| |ə| /ɒv/ |ɒv|

𐐘𐐉𐐔 /ɡɑːd/ |gɑd| /ɡɒd/ |gɒd|

𐐉𐐙 /ɑf/ |ɑf| /ɒf/ |ɒf|

𐐝𐐑𐐉𐐓𐐢𐐇𐐝 /spɑt/ |ˈspɑtləs| /spɒt/ |spɒt|

These words are on the bother end of the bother-father merger. This merger hasn’t taken place in all varieties of British English but has throughout almost all of North America, so the British pronunciations give the intended sound, ɒ.

𐐃𐐢𐐝𐐄 /ˈɔl.soʊ/ |ˈɔlsoʊ| /ˈɔːl.səʊ/ |ˈɔːlsəʊ|

𐐢𐐃𐐡𐐔 /lɔːd/ |lɔrd| /lɔːd/ |lɔːd|

𐐙𐐃𐐡 /fɔɹ/ |fɔ(ə)r| /fɔː(ɹ)/ |fɔː|

𐐃𐐢 /ɔl/ |ɔl| /ɔːl/ |ɔːl|

𐐙𐐃𐐢𐐓𐐝 /fɔlt/ |fɔlt| /fɔːlt/ |fɔːlt|

These words are on the caught end of the cot-caught merger. This merger isn’t considered “standard” in American English, although it has taken place in Utah English, so all the dictionaries agree on what it should sound like, namely ɔ. It’s just not the way I pronounce it.

𐐂𐐡 /ɑɹ/ |ɑr| /ɑː(ɹ)/ |ɑː|

𐐙𐐂𐐛𐐇𐐡𐐞 (NA) |ˈfɑðər| /ˈfɑː.ðə(ɹ)/ |ˈfɑːðə|

𐐗𐐂𐐝𐐓 /kæst/ |kæst| /kɑːst/ |kɑːst|

𐐑𐐂𐐡𐐓 /pɑɹt/ |pɑrt| /pɑːt/ |pɑːt|

This vowel is on the winning wide of both mergers, father and cot, and is the only form of “ah” I can pronounce without a conscious effort. It’s ɑ.

(I actually got a bit mixed up when first I tried to coordinate this data with what Wikipedia has to say about the two mergers, but Ken Beesley corrected me.)

This is actually bad news, largely because I somehow got the impression that the vowel of cot was the more O-ish ɔ, and because I somehow got the impression that it was written with 𐐉. As a result, there are entries in the Deseret Alphabet wiki for 𐐝𐐹𐐱𐐿 and 𐐌𐑆𐐲𐐿 𐐈𐑆𐐲𐑋𐐱𐑂, even though my actual pronunciations are 𐐝𐐹𐐪𐐿 and 𐐈𐑆𐐲𐑋𐐪𐑂, respectively. As for how they’re “correctly” spelled in the Deseret Alphabet—well, I’m giving up. A cobbler should stick to his last. From now on, in any wiki entry I work on or any other DA text I compose, every “ah” is 𐐂 unless I know better, having learned the distinct pronunciation from a dictionary or other unimpeachable source.

(As for our Vulcan and biochemist friends, I don’t know who would be the ultimate authority on how to pronounce “Spock,” but it should by rights either be Gene Roddenberry—who is dead and therefore unavailable—or Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy is from Boston, where they preserve all three vowels, so if one listens very closely, one could probably figure out how “Spock” should be written.

(Asimov was a Russian Jew raised in Brooklyn, and New York is another one of the places that preserves all three “ah” sounds—albeit, that may not include Brooklyn. He is known to have told people that, to pronounce his name, say “has him off” but drop the h's. I could use that to argue that the final vowel was indeed 𐐉, but I think I’m not going to press my luck. First of all, I have audio recordings of the man pronouncing his own name, and he ended it with a /v/, not an /f/. Secondly, he also rhymed it with “stars above” and “mazel tov.” The best thing would be to have someone who can really hear the differences listen to the recordings and figure out which vowel Asimov actually used.)

Take the Name Challenge

2011-04-27T09:41:00.000-07:00

I was thinking last night about the issue of writing with a phonetic alphabet being not quite as simple as one would think, and I came up with a good way of illustrating this. Take the name challenge—try to write you own name in the Deseret Alphabet. For example, let’s try my name.

John. Starting off with my given name, I’m already in trouble. I speak a dialect of English which has undergone what’s called the caught-cot merger, and that means that whereas some dialects of English distinguish |ɑ| and |ɔ| (that’s 𐐉 and 𐐂, respectively, in the Deseret Alphabet—or is it the other way around?), mine doesn’t. I can hear the distinction if I’m listening for it, and I can make it if I want to, but those are both conscious processes. Since I grew up not making the distinction, I can’t off-hand predict with anything near 100% certainty which one will occur in any given word.

So with the name John, I don’t know whether to spell it 𐐖𐐱𐑌 or 𐐖𐐪𐑌. I’ve been spelling it 𐐖𐐱𐑌, but I have to check either in a dictionary or in some of the extent materials in the Deseret Alphabet (in this case the Deseret Third Reader) to be sure. Fortunately, it says 𐐖𐐱𐑌 and I happen to have done it correctly.

Now, a child growing up with the Deseret Alphabet wouldn’t have this problem. Even if they spoke Utah English as I do, they would simply learn that John is spelled with a 𐐉 and not a 𐐂, the same way that French kids grow up knowing that chat is a boy cat and chatte is a girl cat, or, for that matter, the way an English-speaking kid grows up knowing that John usually has a silent h, but since it can be spelled Jon, you have to learn for any particular John you meet which one it is. Since John is short and common, kids would probably pick up on the proper Deseret Alphabet spelling without even realizing it.

At the same time, this does mean that at some point a lot of the Deseret Alphabet generation will come home and complain to their parents, “I thought we were supposed to spell everything the way we pronounce it? So what’s with all this crap about 𐐉, 𐐂 and 𐐃?”

Howard. Even worse. To start with, is that 'w' there simply as part of the “ow” vowel we start with, or do I actually pronounce a |w| sound? Am I saying “how-ard” or “how-ward”? It sounds to me like there’s a |w| sound in there, that my mouth isn’t just pretending to make a |w| on its way from the one vowel to the other without actually doing so, but I’m not entirely sure.

As for the second vowel, it precedes an |r|, and that always screws up vowels. Since it’s written with an ‘a’, you would assume that there either is or was an “ah” sound there—I’m guessing 𐐪, but I’m not sure. Still, it’s an unstressed vowel, and those tend to turn into schwas, and when I sound the word out, it sounds a bit more schwa-y than not. I’ll go therefore with 𐐐𐐵𐐶𐐲𐑉𐐼, but again I don’t know without checking a dictionary. “Howard” isn’t any of the published Deseret Alphabet materials so far as I know, but a modern dictionary says |ˈhaʊərd|, which means I’m wrong and it should have been 𐐐𐐵𐐲𐑉𐐼.

Jenkins. There are two ways to pronounce my surname, my way and the wrong way. My way has a long vowel in it, |e|. The wrong way has a short vowel in it, |ɛ|.

The ‘n’ is a bit problematic. The problem is that it precedes a ‘k’, and in English, |n| tends to turn into |ŋ| when this happens. The tongue is in the same position for |ŋ| and |k|, you see, and so it tends to move into that position a bit early when it’s working with an |n| in order to get ready for the |k|.

Historically, the name is Jen-kins or Jan-kins, “Jen/Jan” being one of the many forms of “John” out there and “-kin” or “-kins” being a diminutive (think lamby-kins, and yes, that means my name is “John Johnny”). That means that it was definitely an |n| sound way back when and I do hear people pronounce “Jenkins” with a very distinct |n|. In listening to what I say, however, and paying attention to what my tongue is doing, I’m pretty sure I’ve got a |ŋ|.

(This, by the way, is a major defect of standard English spelling and one place where the Deseret Alphabet has a very distinct advantage. The DA may be missing a letter for schwa, but it has letters for both |ŋ| and |ʒ|, whereas the standard English alphabet has no consistent way of spelling them. |ŋ| is usually “ng”, but sometimes, as here, it isn’t indicated in the spelling at all.)

As for the second vowel, it sounds like a |ɪ| to me, but since it’s unstressed that may be another schwa. The ‘i’ indicates that it was historically |ɪ|-ish, but that’s not a big help. Anyway, I’m going with |ɪ|. The net result here is 𐐖𐐩𐑍𐐿𐐮𐑌𐑆.

And I’m wrong again. The Mac OS X dictionary application says |ˈʤɛŋkənz|, which would be 𐐖𐐯𐑍𐐿𐐲𐑌𐑆. Wikipedia says “Jen-kins & Jon-kins”, which is no help at all (except they think it’s an |n|, apparently), and Dictionary.com says |ˈdʒɛŋkɪnz|, which would still be 𐐖𐐯𐑍𐐿𐐮𐑌𐑆, not 𐐖𐐩𐑍𐐿𐐮𐑌𐑆. All this unanimity on the first vowel surprises me, because it very much sounds like an |e| when I say it. (It goes without saying that the extant Deseret Alphabet publications are no help.)

Unlike John, though, Jenkins isn’t exactly common. It’s not rare, of course, but it’s rare enough that a child may very well go all the way through school never learning from the school the proper spelling in the Deseret Alphabet. They would simply spell it the way the adults do, and as an adult, I would have said 𐐖𐐩𐑍𐐿𐐮𐑌𐑆 without really thinking and certainly without consulting a dictionary. I think the net result would be that multiple spellings would come into use, and some people would be 𐐖𐐩𐑍𐐿𐐮𐑌𐑆, some would be 𐐖𐐯𐑍𐐿𐐲𐑌𐑆, and some would be 𐐖𐐯𐑍𐐿𐐮𐑌𐑆. (And some would be 𐐖𐐯𐑌𐐿𐐮𐑌𐑆, too.) It’s not unlike the fact that we have Jenkins and Jenkin (or John and Jon). Once this starts showing up on legal records, the spellings tend to get frozen even if in retrospect they’re wrong.

(To name an example near and dear to my heart, the late writer Isaac Asimov had the spelling of his surname fixed when his family moved to the US from the Soviet Union in 1923. His father didn’t know English at the time and so did the best he could coming up with the spelling—but the name was, in practice, pronounced with a final |f|, not a final |v|, and the spelling was incorrect. By the time anybody realized this, though, it was too late.)

Now names are notoriously tricky things. Since they’re part of people’s identieis, people get very possessive about them and do insist on certain spellings and pronunciations, even when they don’t really make any sense. I’m willing to bet that had the DA gone into widespread use, we would have pretty quickly been seeing some boys named 𐐖𐐪𐑌 who would get as upset if you spelled it 𐐖𐐱𐑌 as I do if you spell my first name “Jon.”

Realistically, too, my name is unusually fraught with difficulties. My wife’s maiden name, for example, is very unambiguously 𐐐𐐴𐐼𐐨 𐐤𐐯𐑊𐑅𐐲𐑌 in the Deseret Alphabet, and our youngest clearly has 𐐄𐑊𐐮𐑂𐐨𐐲 𐐡𐐬𐑆 for her given names. Our other kids, though—Mary Catherine and Joseph Richard—well, of the four names there, “Joseph” is the only one that’s entirely straightforward.

And I’m not going to deny that standard English spelling is any better, because it is genuinely worse. Not only do you have John-Jon and the like, but you have people who deliberately come up with cutsie spellings like Shellee or you have people with legitimate but rare names, like my sister Maren who has spent her life trying to explain to people that it rhymes with “Karen” and isn’t some bizarre variant of Maureen. (In Deseret Alphabet-land, it would only be a matter of time before you found girls called 𐐟𐐯𐑊𐐨𐐨. That’s just the way people are, more’s the pity.)

My point, however, is something quite different. The Deseret Alphabet spellings would be considerably more straightforward than standard English spellings are, there’s no doubt of it. Nonetheless, even with a nominally “phonetic” alphabet, coming up with a standard, agreed-upon spelling for a word may be more complicated than one would think.

In Which I Get Taken Down a Notch (or Two)

2011-04-26T16:19:00.000-07:00

Write-up still on its way. I promise.

Meanwhile, a question was raised last week on the Deseret Alphabet discussion group by one Bob Moultrie, who asked, “But that makes me wonder if learning to read and write would be much easier if we used Deseret. I know that this is the reason Brigham Young wanted to develop the Deseret Alphabet, but do you guys think the Deseret Alphabet could really deliver on this goal?”

Well, I could hardly resist a challenge like this and so pontificated on the various shortcomings I think the DA had in practice that would keep it from succeeding in that mission. Among them was the usual spiel about ascenders and descenders.

I was taken to task for that by none other than Joshua Erickson, who has designed some very nice Deseret Alphabet typefaces. He chided me (and rightly so) for being behind the times on the subject and provided a number of helpful links indicating that we do not, in fact, recognize words by their overall shape, but that we do process the individual letters. Interestingly enough, we process a number of letters all at once rather than each by itself.

I don’t think that changes the essential point of the argument, that the lack of ascenders and descenders adds to the difficulty of reading the DA. As Ken Beesley pointed out, one of the things we use to recognize the shape of the individual letters is, in fact, whether or not they have ascenders or descenders, and that lack does hinder our processing.

It, does, however explain very nicely some other things. For example, I have a much harder time reading Shavian than the Deseret Alphabet, despite the fact that the formal is systematic, very elegant, and has ascenders and descenders all over the place. The fact is, however, that many of the letters in the Deseret Alphabet either are the same as letters in the Latin alphabet or very like various Latin letters. That is, the shapes of the letters of the Deseret Alphabet are already half-familiar if not completely familiar, so the process of recognizing them as individuals can take advantage of skills we already have. In the case of Shavian, however, not only are the letters almost entirely different from their Latin “counterparts,” but they are designed along entirely different lines, so the process of distinguishing them involves different, well, algorithms, if you will. Instead of being able to leverage the techniques we've already learned to distinguish letters, we have to learn new ones.

The other thing that it explains is how people read various scripts which inherently lack ascenders and descenders. Modern Hebrew is pretty much in this boat, although some letters do have descenders when written in final positions, but the examples I have in mind are naturally East Asian ones. Every character in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Yi (among others) is written in a square, and most characters pretty much extend to all four sides of the square. So how do East Asians read?

Well, it would be pretty much the same thing, although applied to parts of individual sinograms rather than individual letters. The issue in this case becomes one of what one learns to look for in order to distinguish the symbols, not the essential process of reading. As is the case with an alphabet, the phonetic content of the characters (vague though it generally is) is an aid to learning, and not an aid to reading. (Unfortunately for me, there are several sets of characters involving the same phonetic element which still confuse me because they just look too similar to one another in my eyes.)

When learning to read a language written with a modern Latin script, we learn that we have to distinguish letters as wholes and that one of the things that's useful in doing that is their presence (or lack) of ascenders and descenders. When learning to read sinograms, you learn to look at parts of individual characters and how to tell, for example, the water moon radical from the almost identical meat radical. (Answer: the meat radical tends to be slightly wider.) Presumably, when learning to read the Deseret Alphabet, particularly as a child, one would learn to look for the little curlicue inside some of the letters, the very curlicues which trip up us Latin-readers because they distinguish letters without changing their shape, and it’s largely shape changes we’re looking for.

Interestingly enough, this helps justify the non-phonetic aspects of various scripts. In the case of Chinese, the fact that there are multiple phonetics for the same sound makes it easier to distinguish homophones. All the various forms of Chinese have lots of homophones. One reason why the language developed tones was, apparently, to help distinguish homophones, and one reason why the Chinese haven’t abandoned their writing system is that there are a lot of words that really do sound exactly alike and can’t necessarily be distinguished simply by their pronunciation. For extended texts, context is usually enough to tell them apart, of course, otherwise speech would be pretty much impossible—but this is not necessarily true for shorter texts.

For the record, I’ve also seen people who justify some of the weirder aspects of English spelling because it means we can distinguish homophones like "two," "too," and "to," as if context weren’t enough to do that.

I’m not convinced that this is a significant advantage, but it would be unfair to deny that it does exist.

Meanwhile, I get to kick myself not only for being condescending to Joshua, but for actually praising his fonts in the third person without even noticing that I was talking to the man himself.

English, non-English, and the Deseret Alphabet

2010-02-15T11:23:00.000-08:00

I still need to write up December’s talk down Provo-way, but I had some thoughts fresh in my mind that I wanted to get down, so we’ll just have to proceed sans that writeup for a bit longer.

One issue I’ve run into recently is the problem of writing non-English words in a passage of English text using the Deseret Alphabet. (See, for example, http://tinyurl.com/y8lqkwp and http://tinyurl.com/y93zzyj.)

Now, the intention of the inventors of the Deseret Alphabet was very clearly that it could be used with other languages (as was pointed out in December’s talk), and so I think that their response would be that non-English words used in a passage of English should be written with the Deseret Alphabet.

I ended up disagreeing with them, however.

To begin with, their experience of writing was pretty much limited to Indo-European languages and Biblical Hebrew. (And among Indo-European languages, it was pretty much limited to Germanic languages, Romance languages, and Welsh.) By “experience,” I don’t just mean that of George D. Watt and the Regents of the University of Deseret, but the Church as a whole. They would also have been aware of some Native American languages, but, like all but one of the language Church members were familiar with at the time, they were written in the Latin alphabet if at all.

In any event, the Deseret Alphabet, which was designed with English in mind and therefore matches the phonetic/phonemic system of English, is going to do less well with other languages. Good examples would be French nasalized vowels and the French “r,” or the German umlauted vowels and “ch,” or the Welsh “ll.” Absent modifications of the Deseret Alphabet itself to handle such sounds by adding new letters (à la the IPA), or the development of orthographies for other languages that modify the sound-values of the various letters within the Deseret Alphabet, you’re really not dealing with the other language qua a language, but rather a transliteration of the native orthography into the Deseret Alphabet or the anglicization of the foreign word.

If you’ve got an anglicization, it’s no longer stricto senu a foreign word. As for developing a transliteration or new orthography, they are very tricky and not at all easy to do well. Anyone familiar with an East Asian language written with hanzi, kana, or hangul will be very much aware of the existence of competing transliteration schemes into the Latin alphabet (usually called romanizations in this context), none of them entirely satisfactory.

So, for me, just trying to write the foreign word in the Deseret Alphabet is a non-starter. Leave the foreign word in the appropriate orthography.

Which leaves open a big question: What is a foreign word? It also leads to a smaller one: What is the appropriate orthography?

The general English practice when writing a foreign word is to italicize it if it is a genuinely foreign and to leave it unitalicized if it’s gone native. So “sans” up above is not italicized, because it’s a naturalized English citizen, whereas “stricto sensu” is because it’s not.

Of course, that really doesn’t answer the first question, since it kind of assumes the answer (i.e., it begs the question in the sense that logicians give that phrase). And in any event, it’s a solution to a slightly different problem.

Now, in some cases, there are obvious criteria. With place names, for example, one has cases where the English name is something very different from the native one (Florence, Munich, Moscow, Wales), or the English pronunciation is distinct from the native one and of long standing (Paris, Seville). In such cases, you go with the Deseret Alphabet.

Not that this makes things easy. In China, if I were to use older English names instead of the ones the mainland Chinese government encourages (Canton for Guangzhou, Peking for Beijing), I’d probably use the Deseret Alphabet.

Hong Kong places mostly have official English names because of its former status as a British colony, and in any event there is no reasonably universal romanization of Cantonese to use instead. And if the PRC government were to try to impose new spellings based on Mandarin, the Cantonese-speaking locals would probably object. We’re not going to see the place called Xianggang anytime soon. So Hong Kong place names pretty much get transliterated to the Deseret Alphabet.

Shanghai may seem borderline because that’s still the preferred spelling, but the word has been thoroughly anglicized to the point that “to shanghai” is a recognized verb in English. It gets transliterated, too.

But what about using the new names, or the names of relatively obscure places which never had a really standard English name per se?

In this case, I opted to use Hanyu pinyin sans tone marks, as is standard English practice, simply because these new names are the native names being written with a very specific romanization. On an ambitious day, I may leave in the tone marks. As a result, in the middle of a passage about China, names such as Guangzhou are left as Guangzhou, whereas Canton becomes 𐐗𐐰𐑌𐐻𐐱𐑌.

Species names (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) are theoretically Latin and written in italics anyway. Since the genus is part of the species name and is Latin, it stays in the Latin alphabet, too. So do names down the classification tree from family to order and beyond. When I’m talking about the family Felidae, that stays in Latin, but if I’m talking about felines, that gets Deseretified.

If a word keeps its accents (garçon, Māori) or non-English letters (Hawaiʼi), I think of it as foreign and it stays Latin, even if there’s a common English mangling. If the word is high-falootin’ and pretentious, it ain’t English either and is left alone. (Pretentious? Moi?). And if the word just feels foreign to me, it stays Latin, at least when written by me. Sorry, folks, cwm is not an English word.

As for the proper orthography, this becomes a big issue with languages whose native speakers don’t use the Latin alphabet when writing. It was something that the original designers probably never even thought of because, as I say, one would expect them to grok writing in a non-Latin script only in the case of biblical Greek and Hebrew.

That is so nineteenth century.

There is an increasing recognition that global communication is inherently multilingual and, with the proliferation of computers that can handle multiple scripts at once, an increasing willingness to at least show a word in its native orthography (that is, written with the native script), even if it’s immediately followed by a English-based Latin transliteration. You see this a lot on Wikipedia.

I like this trend, and particularly in the Deseret Alphabet wikia, it’s quite appropriate to litter the text with sinograms or Cyrillic.

But beyond that, scholars and the educated have rarely hesitated in the past to leave non-Latin text non-Latin if the reader can be expected to read it that way. The official libretto for Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe includes “the οἱ πολλοί [sic].”

I like this trend, too, but realistically, one can no longer assume any familiarity with any specific non-Latin alphabet, even among the education.

So the answer to the second question starts out, “At least show the word in the native script where reasonable.”

Even in the world in general, speakers of minority languages are being more assertive about the right for the words in their language to be spelled with the “native” spelling simply as a way of legitimizing the use of that language. (Of course, it helps to have a government buying in.) As a result, spellings such as “Hawaiʼi” and “Māori” are becoming more common.

And I like legitimizing minority languages as well. (C’mon, Irish! Don’t die on us!)

Given all that, and given my personal reluctance to devise Deseret Alphabet transliterations or orthographies for any non-English language, the answer to the second question ends, “Otherwise, use a standard Latin spelling or transliteration.”

One of the main disadvantages of the Deseret Alphabet was that, even had it succeeded, people would have had to learn both scripts, Deseret and Latin. Even were the English-speaking world generally to have adopted Deseret, Latin would have to be learned by everybody for a generation or so as to read older books, and the educated would continue need it for non-English European languages (et al.). And until the English-speaking world itself switched over, Mormon missionaries could hardly be expected to proselyte among English-speakers without knowing English written with the Latin alphabet.

So the Deseret Alphabet was, at least in the short term, worse for education rather than better.

In any event, because practical concerns would have kept “native readers” of the Deseret Alphabet literate in the Latin one for quite some time, I really have no qualms about littering an ostensibly Deseret Alphabet text with words written in the Latin alphabet, even if it looks kind of weird. I prefer to err on the side of caution and let non-English words remain non-English. Even when speaking English, we use a lot of borrowings from different languages, and it’s OK not to pretend otherwise.

Vive la différence!

Some Announcements

2010-01-29T13:26:00.000-08:00

I’ve been holding off writing because I wanted to do a summary of the excellent talk on the Deseret Alphabet given last month at the Crandall Historical Printing Museum in Provo, but there are a couple of things I need to mention before I forget.

I’ve made my Deseret Alphabet keyboard for Mac OS X (10.6 Snow Leopard or later) available on my Web site. It comes as an archive with instructions for installation and use.

I decided to move the Deseret Alphabet wiki to Wikia. My server at home has not been as reliable as I would like for this kind of purpose.

Finally, while poking around on the Web, I discovered that there is/was an experimental translation of the popular Web comic XKCD in Shavian. Well, I can’t let Shavian get away with this and not respond, so I’ve put up the most recent XKCD in the Deseret Alphabet and may or may not continue this in the future. Special thanks to my daughter, Mary, for the Deseret Alphabet glyphs in the font and to the gang who put DejaVu together for the rest of the font.

Oh, and Some Good News

2009-09-03T19:45:00.000-07:00

Now that Snow Leopard is released for Macs, there is good news on the keyboard front. There’s been a long-standing bug in Mac keyboard support that prevented the creation of decent keyboards for the Deseret Alphabet, keyboard which would let you type 𐐟, not by some obscene and hard-to-remember key chord, but by typing S-h. (Or S-H.)

That bug has finally been fixed, and I have a keyboard I’ve been using which takes advantage of the bug fix. You still have to cure yourself of some old Latin typing habits, but it’s a vast improvement on what went before.

It’s not quite ready for release yet; I need to write up documentation. But as soon as that’s done, I’ll post it somewhere appropriate.

The John T. Morris Headstone

2009-08-29T20:27:00.001-07:00

Well, crap.

I happened to be in Cedar City this past week, and we accidentally drove past the Cedar City cemetery while we were there. This called to mind some adventures my wife and I had last summer in the same area.

When people list the materials available in the Deseret Alphabet, one of the items always listed is "a tombstone in Cedar City." At least, I always list it, and that's the way I've always listed it in the past.

My wife and I attended the Utah Shakespearean Festival last summer, and while we were there, I thought it would be a good opportunity to track down this tombstone. So, armed with my iPhone (complete with GPS), we walked north from our hotel towards the cemetery.

Along the way we ran into a local historical museum and we went inside. After all, we didn't know whose tombstone we would be looking for or where said tombstone is. It shouldn't be surprising that it was rather difficult to get help. Most of the people there didn't know what the Deseret Alphabet was. One of them said she'd heard of a tombstone in the cemetery with funny writing on it, but she didn't know where it was. Her sister-in-law, however, could probably help us, so she pulled out her cell phone and called her sister-in-law, who was fortunately available and told us that it was about halfway across the older section of the cemetery. (At this point I don't remember whether or not she said it was towards the road.) She didn't remember whose tombstone it was.

Fortunately for us, it was practically on the road. We found it, rested a bit, took some pictures, then headed back to our hotel.

One thing I had intended was for the pictures taken on my iPhone to precisely identify the location of the tombstone. It wasn't until just now when I checked that I found out that I hadn't turned on that location stamping for pictures when I took them. (Excuse me a minute while I bang my head against the wall.) So I'm going to have to do it the old-fashioned way: with Google maps.

The tombstone is actually a relatively recent replacement for one originally made for John T. Morris, who died 20 February 1855. The original was made of local sandstone and weathered rather badly. Morris was a Welshman and must have been among the earliest settlers in Cedar City, which was itself only founded in its current location in 1855. (It had originally been established at a somewhat different site only four years earlier.) Morris was 27 at the time of his death and died only four days before his infant son, John Walker Morris, aged five months. One presumes that there was an infectious disease that carried them both away.

It is located between 700 and 800 North Main Street in Cedar City, at approximately 37° 41' 24" N 113° 3' 43" W. Actually, I think it's a little to the south of this, but here's a map, anyway:

View Larger Map

It is very close to the eastern edge of the cemetery. As I recall, there are practically no tombstones between it and the road. It's large and upright with the writing facing the road. The writing has some interesting features, including a totally unexpected spelling of "John," and an M-glyph that is practically a base clef.

I did try to get a glimpse of it from our tour bus as we drove past, but because I hadn't expected to drive past the cemetery, I hadn't refreshed my own memory of the stone's appearance and so managed to miss it.

I've also put a complete set of pictures my wife and I took up on Mobile Me.

Meanwhile my apologies for my lapse of a year ago in not getting my iPhone properly set up before snapping away.

Alice in Deseret

2009-07-27T11:00:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, I received email from Thomas Thurman, mentioning a wiki he’s set up for Shavian. (Yes, I should have written about this as soon as the email came in, and yes, I'm frightfully behind on a lot of stuff at the moment.)

The main reason he was writing to me was to let me know that the site supports conversion to the Deseret Alphabet and, as a demonstration, he’s put up Alice in Wonderland. You can find it at http://tinyurl.com/mxaodx.

There is a glitch in the conversion process at the moment. Shavian uses special letters for vowels followed by an -r sound and these are left unconverted when going over to Deseret. (There is also the problem of the two alphabets being intended to accommodate two different dialects of English: English as spoken by George V for Shavian, and what I believe to be New England English for Deseret.)

Still, it's rather cool to see something other than the LDS Scriptures available in Deseret. The site as a whole is worth keeping an eye on.

The Deseret Alphabet Hits the Big Time (Kind Of)!

2009-05-08T20:14:00.000-07:00

I was going to blather on a bit about pronunciation issues, since that’s cropped up in my life this past week, but I have something better to talk about instead.

The Deseret Alphabet has been in Unicode since version 3.1 of the standard (March 2001), so it’s hardly new there. And it’s been included in Apple’s Apple Symbols font since Mac OS X 10.3 (October 2003), so it’s hardly new there, either.

Today, the Deseret Alphabet took the next big step forward. Associated with Unicode is a second project, the Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR). A locale in computer parlance is a linking of a place with a language, and it refers to all the standard names for things or standard ways of doing things in that place/language combination. Locales make it possible for me to specify my place (Salt Lake City) and language (English), and, armed with that information, my computer can set the default names for the months and days of the weeks, the default format to use for dates and times, the default currency, the default units of measurements, and so on. Of course, I can override these if I choose, but the goal is to make it as unnecessary as possible.

Version 1.6 was under development a year or so ago, and I spent a couple of evenings madly typing in Deseret Alphabet (and Shavian) data to make Deseret and Shavian locales possible. Unfortunately, the rules for inclusion in CLDR 1.6 meant that Deseret and Shavian didn’t make it, because I was the only one who had vetted the data. The rules were relaxed somewhat for version 1.7, however, and with its release today, the Deseret Alphabet can now be used in conjunction with locale information to provide standard information for the computer to use in all kinds of interesting places.

Now, I don’t know when CLDR 1.7 will start showing up in shipping projects (e.g., Mac OS X Snow Leopard). It is, however, entirely probable that within a year software you and I and other normal people use will actually be able to use the Deseret Alphabet automatically for things like dates and times.

(I am a normal person, aren’t I?)

In Which I Answer My Own Question

2009-03-15T10:55:00.000-07:00

“Butter” is attested in the Book of Mormon, at 2 Nephi 17:15 and 2 Nephi 17:22. Unfortunately, the Deseret Third Reader, which I own (the full Book of Mormon being rather to rich for my taste these days), uses the old versification, so it takes a bit of digging. There it is, though, in ix.6, “𐐺𐐲𐐻𐐯𐑉.”

A similar word, “utter,” is attested much earlier in the Deseret Third Reader, at I Nephi i.16 (in the old versification), just before Nephi’s statement, much beloved by Seminary students the world over, that his father dwelt in a tent. “Utter” comes out as “𐐲𐐻𐐯𐑉.”

Now the second vowel here is rather interesting, because that’s not at all how I pronounce either word. “Little” at I Nephi ii.4 (old versification) comes out “𐑊𐐮𐐻𐑊,” with no vowel marked at all for the second syllable. To my ear, both words have the same vowel.

This, however, is one aspect of the English language. The /r/ phoneme can do funny things to vowels, and without training, it can sometimes be difficult to figure out exactly what it is. Shavian actually has mandatory ligatures for various vowels followed by /r/, although there is some confusion as to what the intended vowels are. (Check Wikipedia for details.) If you were to ask me what vowel is used in the second syllable of “butter,” “utter,” or “little,” I would say it was a schwa—which is another problem.

English uses the schwa a lot; it’s the most common vowel in the language, largely because English tends to reduce vowels in unstressed syllables to schwa. We tend to hear it, too, for syllabic consonants, consonants which are syllables all to themselves, as in “little.” Strictly speaking, although “little” has two syllables, the second syllable has no vowel, even though it sounds like it has a schwa in there. If, however, you actually pronounce it in full with the schwa you can hear the difference.

Deseret does have a letter for schwa, 𐐲, and one would naturally expect written materials to be littered with it. One would also expect that people who sound out words in their own mind to spell words in Deseret (like me) would put in a lot of schwas. Professional phoneticians wouldn’t have quite so many, and neither would people who get their spellings from the works of professional phoneticians, like Orson Pratt. Hence “𐑊𐐮𐐻𐑊” with a syllabic consonant, and not “𐑊𐐮𐐻𐐲𐑊.”

Even worse—and this is my real point today—is that some words will change their pronunciation depending on the level of emphasis. This is one of the big problems with the Deseret Alphabet. “The” is actually not a good example, because of the convention in the Deseret Alphabet to spell it using a single letter, 𐑄. The naïve tendency would otherwise be to spell it with a schwa, 𐑄𐐲, under most circumstances because that’s the sound we make when we aren’t stressing the word. That, however, is only because we’re reducing the vowel because it isn't stressed. When the word is emphasized, as above, we use the full vowel and “the” rhymes with “thee.” (Hence the convention in the Deseret Alphabet, which foolishly allows letter names to be spelled with the letter by itself, as in “𐑄” for “the” and “thee,” “𐐺” for “be” or “bee,” and presumably “𐑀” for “gay,” although I haven’t actually seen that attested in the 19th century materials.)

What this means for overall spelling is that we’re left with a dilemma. If we really want the Deseret Alphabet to be phonemic, we need to spell words with the full vowel even if what isn’t what we usually say. Orson Pratt derived his spellings largely from Webster’s dictionary; but dictionaries have the luxury of allowing for multiple pronunciations, and text in the Deseret Alphabet does not. So in this kind of case, what did Orson do? I’ll have to look up some examples and check.

So How Do You Pronounce “Deseret,” Anywhere?

2009-03-09T13:09:00.001-07:00

Simple question, should have an easy answer. I’ve lived most of my life in Salt Lake City, fourth- or fifth-generation LDS, and between the book store, and the old gym, and the industries amongst others, I’ve heard the word pronounced [dɛzə'rɛt] with absolute consistency. Indeed, the only time I’ve ever heard it pronounced any way was at a Unicode meeting where one of the participants, under the mistaken impression that it was a French word, I suppose, pronounced it [dɛzə'eː].

So one of the great mysteries of the Deseret Alphabet is the fact that it is consistently transcribed as 𐐔𐐯𐑅𐐨𐑉𐐯𐐻 by Orson Pratt. But that brings up the fundamental problem of the Deseret Alphabet, which has different ramifications. The problem is determining how to spell words in the Deseret Alphabet, and the first ramification is the problem of phonetic vs. phonemic.

Linguistics has advanced somewhat in the century-and-a-half since the DA was first bruited, and one distinction that we would now make is between phonetic and phonemic. “Phonetic” is the simpler concept, since it has to do with the sounds we actually make. “Phonemic” is a bit more complicated, in that it has to do with the sounds we are theoretically making.

The word “dogs” is a good illustration of the distinction. We spell the plural here with an -s, even though we make a [z] sound when we say the word. The -s reflects the fact that sound we’re making is theoretically an [s] sound, but the phonetic rules of English don’t allow a pronunciation like [dɔgs] (go ahead, try to say it with an [s]).

On the other hand, there are words like “butter.” Wictionary gives its pronunciation as /'bʌɾ.ɚ/ Now, maybe you can read IPA and maybe you can’t, but one thing seems pretty clear: there isn’t a “t” in there anywhere. Again, this is a side-effect of English phonetic rules, which turn the /t/ phoneme into an alveolar tap (that’s the ɾ-thingie in the middle) in this particular context.

I’ll freely confess that I’m not a linguist of any stripe, let alone a phoneticist, and so my analysis up there may be wrong. In particular, I’m not personally convinced that we really us an /s/ phoneme when we make the plural of “dog,” largely because everybody knows that it’s a [z] sound that’s showing up in actual speech. The alveolar tap in the middle of “butter” is something else, since most people think they’re saying [t]. If they think about it, they may realize it sounds more like a [d]. Only someone with linguistic training would call it an alveolar tap.

On the whole, while the Deseret Alphabet is generally touted as a phonetic alphabet, it actually tends towards the phonemic. English actually uses a lot more sounds than the thirty-eight the Deseret Alphabet can distinguish (as the alveolar tap attests). On the other hand, it consistently uses 𐑆 as the plural for words like 𐐼𐐱𐑀, but as I say, that one has percolated down to the common consciousness. I’m sure that a Deseret Alphabet spelling for “butter” is somewhere attested; it would be interesting to see it.

So, Why Not Use Huneybee, Anyway?

2009-02-27T12:03:00.000-08:00

One of the things that surprises me as I poke around the World Wide Web looking for Deseret Alphabet materials is the presence of Huneybee and recommendations that it be used. I have nothing against its design—indeed, I am happy to see new designs of the Deseret Alphabet, particularly if they’re not slavish copies of the font used for the four books printed in the 1860’s—but I will confess that Huneybee’s continued use makes me shudder.

The problem can be summarized in one word, mojibake. Computers, after all, don’t represent text qua text; they represent text via numbers. Text is stored internally via a series of numbers, and the software involved has to somehow map these numbers into something the user can see.

In practice, there are actually three sets of numbers associated with text. The first is the keycode, the number associated with the physical key the user is pressing. The second is the character code, the number used internally to represent a particular character. The third is the glyph ID, which is the index of a particular graphic shape within a font.

Naïve users (that is to say, most computer users, especially people whose experience is based on English where text display is obscenely simple) assume that there is a direct mapping between the three. Huneybee is an example of this. You want to see a particular symbol on screen or in print, and you want to generate it by using a particular keystroke. For example, you may want to type shift-S and have 𐐝 show up at the other end. You get this result by using your font-production software by inserting the 𐐝 glyph in the slot currently occupied by S. Done!

All this works if you are generating a text for immediate display and you don’t care what happens down the line, either when you transmit the text to someone else or when you come back in five years and try to edit the text. In order for this to work over space or time, you need to guarantee that the person at the other end has the right font installed and is set up to use it. If not, you get garbled nonsense, mojibake. The 2006 New Deseret Reader illustrates this. It works, if you have Huneybee installed. If not, you get illegible nonsense.

This is actually a serious problem in computer science and is one of the main motivations underlying Unicode. I still have some of the first computer-generated documents I ever made, but I can’t use them anymore. They were written using defunct software with an undocumented internal format on a defunct platform (the Atari ST) using a defunct, proprietary character set. Trajan’s column can still be read effortlessly nearly two thousand years after it was erected, but my own journals from the early 1980’s are illegible.

(I spent a fair chunk of my wasted youth as a secretary in the Molecular Biology department at the university where I did graduate work. We started out with WordPerfect on DOS, which was a very non-WYSIWYG environment. Once, I managed to switch the font to “Greek” to insert some symbols but not switch back and didn’t realize it until I printed a draft and the last two-thirds of the paper in question came out as garbage.

(I should also point out in fairness that I did this kind of thing myself out of laziness when I produced the Deseret Alphabet Triple Combination in 1997. I knew better, but I did it anyway, and I regret it now. I’ve managed to get away with it because the document is a PDF and doesn’t store the text as text, but as glyph IDs for an embedded font, so the data is entirely self-contained. It is, however, impossible for me to take that document and back-convert it to raw text because I don’t have a copy of the font I used anymore. I could probably manage to recreate the encoding, but more likely than not, I’m going to have to do the work all over again.)

The New Deseret Reader, by the way, illustrates another aspect of this problem. Because the Deseret Alphabet has thirty-eight letters in its standard form, and because it uses both upper- and lower-cases, you need room for seventy-six letters, whereas ASCII only has slots for fifty-two. That means that you have to steal slots from punctuation as well as letters, and that means that you can’t use the punctuation yourself. Or Latin letters, for that matter, if you want to intermingle scripts.

There is a natural solution to this, and it comes in two pieces. The first piece is to decouple the characters from the specific font being used to represent them, and this is what Unicode does. It provides a standard way of representing text for dozens of writing systems and thousands of languages which is not tied to a specific font or platform. You still need a font covering the specific language/script in question, of course, but you don’t need to have a specific version of a specific font. Thus Wikipedia’s article on the Deseret Alphabet can contain Deseret Alphabet text and not require you to download and install a specific font before you can do it. You can use any Unicode-savvy Deseret Alphabet font you want. If you’re on a Mac, of course, you’re in luck because every Mac ships with a Unicode-savvy Deseret Alphabet font. If you’re on Windows, you can use James Kass’s excellent Code2001 font.

And Unicode’s Web site can contain a whole page of Deseret Alphabet text and blithely assume that this page will continue to be legible for decades to come on any computer system with an appropriate font installed. And even if a font is not available, the text will be indisputably Deseret and not badly-spelled Latin.

There is a slight trickiness in doing this with somewhat older software which doesn’t support the non-BMP portions of Unicode, but current font editing software and operating systems can do so. Some applications may still be lacking in this area, I’m sorry to say, but that will change over time. (Firefox, for example, doesn’t display Unicode Deseret correctly.)

The other thing you need is a keyboard, that is a way of mapping particular keystrokes into particular characters. All major operation systems have a way of using custom keyboard mappings and editors for these mappings are freely available. Now, there are still issues with making a keyboard for the Deseret Alphabet which I’ll go into at some future point. And yes, you do need to have them installed. Making keyboards, however, is trivial and getting them installed isn’t hard.

This, by the way, is what the Deseret Language Kit did for Mac OS 9. It provided a keyboard, font, and other software pieces necessary to get the Deseret Alphabet to work in a semi-standardized way with any Mac software. It hasn’t been as necessary for Mac OS X, because that’s Unicode-based, which is one reason why I haven’t come out with a successor. I do have a keyboard which I use myself when I want to type Deseret text, �� . I have other techniques for converting lots of text at once, however, which are generally easier to use.

Now, I don’t fault the people who do use Huneybee, because by and large they don’t know better. They haven’t run into the practical problems that made software companies like Apple and Microsoft move towards soft keyboard and Unicode. As such, it’s really a communication problem. It’s the responsibility of people like me who do deal with these issues to educate the public at large.

And one has to allow for the fact that people are people and don’t always do things the right way. After all, I’ve been blithely typing two spaces at the end of every sentence in this blog, even though I know it’s wrong.

But the bottom line is, if you really want to communicate with the Deseret Alphabet, use the standardized techniques which have become available and switch to Unicode. If the owner of Huneybee would like me to create a Unicode-savvy version of it, I’d be happy to oblige, pending the free time to do so.

Whys and Wherefores

2009-02-25T16:18:00.000-08:00

I suppose I should start with a word of introduction regarding me and my history with the Deseret Alphabet. My personal involvement with the Deseret Alphabet goes way back to the one linguistics course I took as an undergraduate at the University of Utah, where the instructor brought it up as an example of an interesting local linguistic oddity.

This would have been in late 1977. (Excuse me for a minute while I find a quiet corner in which to have a cry about how long ago this was.) Somewhat over a decade later, I became involved with the Unicode Standard. In those early days of Unicode, there was a list of potential scripts for encoding circulating among the various Unicodets, and amongst these was listed the “Mormon Alphabet.” Knowing something about it—including its proper name—I was quick to point out that it was really not an appropriate candidate for encoding, because it was rather thoroughly dead and not much used when it was alive.

And yet as the 1990’s drew to a middle, Unicode found itself in an awkward position. The standard had originally been designed to support some 65,000 different characters, but it became apparent that this would not be sufficient. An architectural change was added in Unicode 2.1 to deal with this, splitting Unicode into the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) and sixteen additional planes, each plane supporting the same count of 65,500-ish characters.

What then happened was a bit of a chick-and-egg problem. Unicode support was beginning to appear in applications and system software, but it was of the BMP-only sort. As a result, nobody wanted their script to end up in the astral planes, as the new planes were often called; it wouldn’t be supported by current software. And since the astral planes had no actual content, there was little incentive for anybody to even start the process of implementing support.

What was needed was a scapegoat or sacrificial lamb: a script which was arguably a legitimate candidate for encoding but which could live indefinitely as a second-class citizen until software support caught up with it.

As a result, I started to put together proposals for the encoding of various scripts which would reasonably end up in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP) of the standard. There were six, as I recall, and were I sufficiently ambitious I’d look them up. They included, if memory serves, Etruscan, Linear B, Gothic, Shavian and Pollard. The sixth was the Deseret Alphabet. With the exception of Pollard, these are all now encoded, all in the SMP, and work on Pollard is proceeding slowly.

(In fairness, none of these are actually driving non-BMP Unicode support. The characters making non-BMP support a sine qua non are from East Asian character sets such as HK SCS and JIS X 0213. But that would be another blog.)

Actually, Deseret (as it is called in encoding circles) is not an inappropriate candidate for encoding after all. There is a limited amount of printed material in the Deseret Alphabet, to be sure, but a fair amount of additional material of historical interest exists in manuscript. More to the point, there are hobbyists who want to use it even now, despite its serious design flaws.

I am amongst these hobbyists, I’m sorry to say, and have foisted a fair chunk of Deseret material on the world, including this blog. Now, you may have noticed that this blog isn’t actually in the Deseret Alphabet. I may or may not add entries in the DA in the future, depending on software support and the amount of time I’m willing to waste on it. This is more a spot for me to think aloud, as I say, about the technical problems involved in Deseret support and its significance both in LDS culture and in the broader world.