Good News on the Mac Front

Well, Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks has been out now for nearly three months, so I suppose it’s a good time to point out that OS X has added the Deseret Alphabet to another font. The font Apple Symbols has had a full Deseret Alphabet repertoire since 2003 (!), and now the version of Baskerville shipped with OS X also covers the Deseret Alphabet.

The Baskerville glyphs are somewhat experimental and depart from the “standard” glyph shapes (the ones that people have been complaining about since the 1860’s), but not to any outrageous extent. The major features of the redesign are serifs, ascenders, and descenders; these are all distinct advantages for readability. Some lower-case letters have also acquired dots to replace small interior strokes.

The Roman faces are quite serviceable, but the italics still need some polish. On the whole, it’s sufficiently acceptable that the Deseret Alphabets Classics series has switched over to Baskerville from the modified Gentium used in the earlier volumes.

Is the Pronunciation Half Full or Half Empty?

The Wikipedia article on the Deseret Alphabet—in its current incarnation—says the following:

The Deseret alphabet does not have a distinct symbol for the mid-central vowel. This sound is written as what it would be if the syllable that contains it were stressed. For example, the word enough is commonly pronounced [əˈnɐf], but when it is stressed (as in a declaration of irritation) it is pronounced [iˈnɐf]. The Deseret spelling of the word, 𐐨𐑌𐐲𐑁, reflects that stressed pronunciation. 

If /ə/ does not have an inherent stressed value in a word, as is often the case before /r/, then it is written as 𐐲.

(This stressed pronunciation is sometimes referred to as “full”—and indeed was in an earlier manifestation of this article.)

I really need to correct this statement at some point, because I disagree with it. First, however, I need to confirm my hypothesis, which is that the “official” spellings used are derived from Webster’s Dictionary, and that the “full” nature of these vowels is because of that—and because Webster’s was a proscriptive dictionary. That is, it told you how words should be pronounced. 

Modern dictionaries, on the other hand, tend to be descriptive, which means that they tend not to give the full pronunciations. Thus, the New Oxford American Dictionary says that “enough” is pronounced |ɪˈnəf|; |iˈnəf| isn’t even mentioned as a possibility. /ɪˈnʌf/ is given on http://dictionary.reference.com. http://www.merriam-webster.com gives three possibilities: \i-ˈnəf, ē-, ə-\. 

Now, one thing I found out while working on the Unihan database is that I’m not a lexicographer and I don’t want to be. Doing the job even vaguely well is a lot of work. And, frankly, I’d rather not set myself up as an authority on how words are pronounced. When working on the Deseret Classics Library, therefore, I use other people’s judgment whenever possible. I start with a combination of the Carnegie Mellon University phonetic data and the Mac’s text-to-speech engine, but when I run into a case which I’m not completely certain about, I check the three sources mentioned above—which are all conveniently available on my iPad Mini—and Kenyon and Knott’s A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English (1953) as a supplemental printed source. All of these are sufficiently modern that they’re not interested in “full” pronunciations. They’re descriptive, not proscriptive, and since people very rarely actually say |iˈnəf|, it’s not their preferred pronunciation. 

And therefore when I run into the word “enough” in a text, I go with “𐐮𐑌𐐲𐑁” instead of “𐐨𐑌𐐲𐑁.”

Which is certainly enough for now.

Christmas Shopping Not Done?

Do you have that special someone whose present you still need to buy?  Why not give them the gift that keeps on giving: "A Christmas Carol" in the Deseret Alphabet!

A paperback version is available now from Amazon (http://goo.gl/3b4bj); I hope to have an ebook version before much longer.  I'm trying a POD service other than Lulu this time, and so the pricing is slightly better, only $15. (Had I not included color reproductions of the original illustrations, it would be even less.)

(I was going to do something other than "A Christmas Carol," which has been kind of done to death. Everything else I could think of, however, was either too short, too obscure, or too not-in-the-public-domain.)

𐐣𐐯𐑉𐐨 𐐗𐑉𐐮𐑅𐑋𐐲𐑅! 𐐘𐐪𐐼 𐐺𐑊𐐯𐑅 𐐲𐑅, 𐐯𐑂𐑉𐐨 𐐶𐐲𐑌!

Good News for Windows (and Surface?)

The Deseret Alphabet on Windows 8

I recently upgraded from Vista to Windows 8 and, having done so, I was rather surprised to see Deseret Alphabet text showing up correctly.  It turns out that the Segoe UI Symbol font has a complete set of Deseret Alphabet letters (but not Shavian, strangely enough). And they look pretty good, too. Given the close connection between Windows 8 and the OS on Microsoft's Surface tablet, I imagine the same would be true there. I don't know what the situation is on Android, but I know that iOS doesn't ship with a DA font. That means, it would seem, that the Surface may very well be the first tablet to ship with a Deseret Alphabet font.

Now, isn't that something to be thankful for?

Halloween Reading

The Deseret Alphabet edition of A Study in Scarlet has been so overwhelmingly successful—I’ve sold a grand total of one copy, and that was my own—I thought I’d follow it up with something appropriately spooky for Halloween.   I selected a total of fourteen stories and one poem by Edgar Allan Poe, put them all together, and added the beautiful illustrations by Harry Clarke.  The result is Tales of the Macabre (Deseret Alphabet edition).

This is a hardback and is therefore priced even more outrageously than A Study in Scarlet: $30.00 per copy.  I’m still going through Lulu, alas. I’m working on something better and cheaper. But meanwhile—well, it's got pretty pictures!

You Say Potato, I Say Pitato

One of the things that has particularly struck me as I’ve been converting this and that from standard English spelling to the Deseret Alphabet has to do with the fate of reduced vowels.

The mouths of English speakers, you see, are lazy.  When they’re pronouncing a word and come across an unstressed vowel—particularly a short unstressed vowel—they can hardly be bothered to work themselves up to actually pronouncing it. After all, nobody’ll hear it anyway. And so, in their hurry to get on to the next consonant, they reduce the vowel and turn it into something fast and easy to pronounce.

The problem is, there is no general agreement among English speaking mouths as to what, exactly the vowel will be reduced to.

Most popular is the schwa, represented in IPA as /ə/. Most of us, when we say “potato” usually end up saying something like |pəˈteɪdoʊ|.  (That /d/ in there is another issue, but we’ll ignore it for now.)

Schwa, however, has competition in the form of (and here I express my gratitude to Wikipedia) a  near-close central unrounded vowel. It doesn’t get a name of its own, but we Americans usually represent it in IPA with /ɨ/.  If you think of a schwa as a very short /ʌ/ (as in rub), then think of the other fellow as a very short /ɪ/ (as in rib).  In Deseret, we write them with 𐐲 and 𐐮, respectively.

To get a sense of what's going on here, listen very closely to different people pronouncing the word “exist.” Some of them will be saying |əɡˈzɪst|, and others will be saying |ɪɡˈzɪst|.  I, myself, am among the latter.

What throws things off here is that there are no general guides as to which vowel is used in which syllable of which word by which people. Some people use one and some the other. For some people, the two are in free variation; that is, they can be used completely interchangeably and good luck knowing in advance which one you’re going to run into.

I have therefore adopted a convention. The idea is that I want to make the transition from standard written English to the Deseret Alphabet as easy as possible, and therefore I want the Deseret form of a word to somehow “resemble” it’s normal form.  The middle vowel in decimal is reduced, for example, which means that the spellings 𐐼𐐯𐑅𐐲𐑋𐐲𐑊 and 𐐼𐐯𐑅𐐮𐑋𐐲𐑊 are both justifiable. Because the standard spelling uses an “i,” however, I opt for the latter spelling. Similarly, banana lacks an “i,” so it becomes 𐐺𐐲𐑌𐐰𐑌𐐲 instead of 𐐺𐐮𐑌𐐰𐑌𐐲.

I can’t say I’m entirely pleased with the end result all the time, but at least I’m less displeased than I otherwise might be.

Transliteration Service Available

It was recently announced on the Yahoo! Deseret Alphabet group that a service to transliterate standard written English to the Deseret Alphabet is available at http://deseret.in.  I haven't tried it myself (since I use my own software to do that task), but it's definitely worth a look.