The Mormon faith has a special place in the history of the United States, and a significant missionary presence around the world. But did you know about the Mormon alphabet? Between 1847 and 1854, George D Watt, under the leadership of Brigham Young – the second president of the Church of Latter-day Saints – developed a new script, known as the Deseret alphabet, in response to the religiously-informed view that all aspects of life needed reform. The alphabet was intended to be a more phonetically accurate replacement for the Latin alphabet in English, and a stepping stone towards returning to the ‘pure language’ the Mormons believed to have been spoken prior to the construction of the Tower of Babel. Despite considerable effort and expense, the Deseret alphabet was never widely adopted, although in recent years its character set has been encoded in the Unicode standard.
Photo Source: https://www.omniglot.com/writing/deseret.htm
