NewsUniquely Utah

Actions

The history behind Utah's unique and mostly forgotten alphabet

The history behind Utah's unique and mostly forgotten alphabet
Posted

SALT LAKE CITY โ€” ๐œ๐ฎ๐‘… ๐‘…๐ฒ๐‘‹๐ฒ๐‘‰, ๐๐ญ๐ป๐ซ ๐ถ๐ฎ๐‘Š ๐‘…๐ฏ๐‘Š๐ฒ๐บ๐‘‰๐ฉ๐ป ๐‘„ 175th ๐ฐ๐‘Œ๐ฒ๐‘‚๐ฒ๐‘‰๐‘…๐ฒ๐‘‰๐จ ๐ฒ๐‘‚ ๐‘„ ๐ฒ๐‘‰๐ด๐‘‚๐ฒ๐‘Š ๐ฒ๐‘‚ ๐ฃ๐ซ๐‘‰๐‘‹๐ฒ๐‘Œ ๐น๐ด๐ฒ๐‘Œ๐จ๐‘‰๐‘† ๐ฎ๐‘Œ๐ป๐ญ ๐‘„ ๐๐ซ๐‘Š๐ป ๐ข๐ฉ๐ฟ ๐š๐ฐ๐‘Š๐จ. 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.

FOX 13 Investigates: Learn if your Utah home had racist covenants and how to change them

The Deseret Alphabet is a phonetic alphabet with characters that might look a bit like Egyptian hieroglyphics at first glance.

โ€œTheyโ€™re unintelligible,โ€ said Ken Sanders, owner of Ken Sander Rare Books in Salt Lake City.

โ€œBrigham Young had complete and utter autonomy and power,โ€ said Sanders, recounting how the alphabet came to be.

Under Youngโ€™s direction, early settler Charles D. Watt developed the Deseret Alphabet, and in the mid to late 1800โ€™s four books were published in the alphabet.

Three were instructional books, also called โ€œreadersโ€, while the fourth was the Book of Mormon.

โ€œThe readers were produced in ten thousand print-runs, they sat abandoned and unknown in the bowls of a church basement somewhere, and in the 1960โ€™s they were discovered. The BYU Book Store, Deseret Book, Sam Wellerโ€™s all had stacks of them, 50 cents each. I get 300 bucks out of them now, mind you,โ€ said Sanders.

Read - LDS church announces all Historic Sites fully open to the public

While the โ€œreadersโ€ 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 โ€˜Antiques Roadshowโ€™- says complete 1800โ€™s printings of the Book of Mormon in Deseret Alphabet are harder to come by.

โ€œItโ€™s 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. Itโ€™s free and easy to use and can be found by clicking here.