SALT LAKE CITY โ ๐๐ฎ๐ ๐ ๐ฒ๐๐ฒ๐, ๐๐ญ๐ป๐ซ ๐ถ๐ฎ๐ ๐ ๐ฏ๐๐ฒ๐บ๐๐ฉ๐ป ๐ 175th ๐ฐ๐๐ฒ๐๐ฒ๐๐ ๐ฒ๐๐จ ๐ฒ๐ ๐ ๐ฒ๐๐ด๐๐ฒ๐ ๐ฒ๐ ๐ฃ๐ซ๐๐๐ฒ๐ ๐น๐ด๐ฒ๐๐จ๐๐ ๐ฎ๐๐ป๐ญ ๐ ๐๐ซ๐๐ป ๐ข๐ฉ๐ฟ ๐๐ฐ๐๐จ. Did you get that? That's just a taste of Utah's forgotten alphabet, which was created in the mid to late 1800's.
Here's the English version of the sentence above: This summer, Utah will celebrate the 175th anniversary of the arrival of Mormon pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley.
In the years that followed, few people impacted Utah as much as Brigham Young.
Cities and towns he formed are still thriving today.
However, an alphabet he championed was largely forgotten.
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The Deseret Alphabet is a phonetic alphabet with characters that might look a bit like Egyptian hieroglyphics at first glance.
โTheyโre unintelligible,โ said Ken Sanders, owner of Ken Sander Rare Books in Salt Lake City.
โBrigham Young had complete and utter autonomy and power,โ said Sanders, recounting how the alphabet came to be.
Under Youngโs direction, early settler Charles D. Watt developed the Deseret Alphabet, and in the mid to late 1800โs four books were published in the alphabet.
Three were instructional books, also called โreadersโ, while the fourth was the Book of Mormon.
โThe readers were produced in ten thousand print-runs, they sat abandoned and unknown in the bowls of a church basement somewhere, and in the 1960โs they were discovered. The BYU Book Store, Deseret Book, Sam Wellerโs all had stacks of them, 50 cents each. I get 300 bucks out of them now, mind you,โ said Sanders.
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While the โreadersโ can occasionally be found on online auction sites or at rare book stores, Ken Sanders, who has also served as an appraiser for the PBS television series โAntiques Roadshowโ- says complete 1800โs printings of the Book of Mormon in Deseret Alphabet are harder to come by.
โItโs fairly rare, and can fetch between five and ten thousand dollars for a copy,โ Sanders said.
While few people probably utilize the Deseret Alphabet on a regular basis, knowledge of it has become more widespread in the computer age.
One website even offers a Deseret Alphabet Translator. Itโs free and easy to use and can be found by clicking here.