Brigham Young’s ABCs remembered

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    By Ryan Oliver

    A little-known linguistic curiosity from early Utah history is still in use. Well, at least with a few people.

    Rick Shumway is one of the small numbers of people who still know President Brigham Young”s Deseret Alphabet.

    In 1854, the University of Deseret, now the University of Utah, introduced the Deseret Alphabet. The alphabet consisted of 38 characters that correspond to the basic sounds in the English language.

    President Young ordered a committee headed by George D. Watt, an expert in shorthand and the first LDS convert from England, to create the phonetic alphabet.

    Some religious historians believe that the phonetic system was aimed at protecting Utah”s culture and keeping secrets from outsiders.

    “It was a way to promote the idea of having a ”society unto themselves,”” Shumway said. “The early Mormons always fought off outside influences, and this was a way to do that.”

    However, he said he thinks the main purpose of the alphabet was to help non-English speaking converts learn the language more quickly. His personal experience learning the alphabet illustrates his opinion that the alphabet would do little to keep secrets from outsiders.

    Shumway, 52 years old, explained that when he was in seminary he was punished for misbehaving in class. His teacher said he could either have his grade reduced, or he could learn the Deseret Alphabet in one day as punishment.

    Shumway took one of his teacher”s books home and studied it overnight, and came back the next day and read the book to him.

    “He laughed and was happy, and that sparked my interest in the Deseret Alphabet and church history,” Shumway said.

    Author David L. Bigler wrote about the phonetic system in his 1998 book “Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847-1896.”

    “Like the law of consecration, the Deseret Alphabet never achieved widespread acceptance, despite repeated attempts by Young to promote the system,” Bigler wrote. “On some things, the people of Utah quietly overruled their strong-minded leader.”

    Don Norton, a professor of linguistics and the English language at BYU, said there are many reasons the system was discarded after 20 years.

    “Public schools overwhelmed the private schools that were teaching the system,” he said. “But the main problem was the strangeness of the symbols. They should have refined the spelling system in a manner less foreign to church members.”

    Despite the fact that the system fell out of favor with the church, some scholars still recognize the benefits of the Deseret Alphabet.

    “By the standards of its day, it was pretty valid,” Norton said.

    Thomas G. Alexander, an LDS historian, wrote in his book “Things in Heaven and Earth” that there was a need to improve how people learn the English language.

    “The project indicated the extent to which Utah”s community leaders borrowed from outside systems in order to meet a pressing need to introduce phonetic orthography to the English language.”

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