The Deseret Alphabet: A Secret Language from Brigham Young?

[Stargazer]

I had a companion that wrote and spake Klingon. Does that count for anything? Lol.

I once heard that there was a project for translating the BoM into Klingon. Not sure I believe this. BUT, I did know there was an effort to translate the BoM into Esperanto. It has yet to be completed, though. Don't think anyone is still working on it.

[Stargazer]

There have actually been several attempts to construct an easier universal language which would be more intuitive and logical. In fact Esperanto, a language constructed and published in 1887 has up to 1,000 native speakers and as many as 2,000,000 fluent speakers. It is primarily a European effort though. The problem is, not one likes to change. But there are other methods similar to the deseret to lean a language. For example missionaries going to Asia often learn Romanized Chinese, Japanese, or Korean so they can quickly understand how the language works rather than dealing with a bunch of unknown symbols. Although it is different in the fact that they are working with characters they already know it is an example of ways to make the learning the language easier. For English the greatest obstacle is generally not the letters themselves but the complex unintuitive grammatical format and rules.

The surprising thing to some people is that for a constructed language that there COULD be native speakers of it. Of course, the way this would happen would be if a man and woman who were enthusiastic Esperantists from different language countries happened to fall in love and have children. They would have only one common language, Esperanto, and of course their children would learn this one first.

I was once quite enthusiastic about Esperanto, but never learned it well enough to actually speak it.

[Stargazer]

True. I lead the group that hates to change! I remember when they tried to teach us the metric system in school, a MUCH better system than we use. I simply want all changes to happen before I'm born, so that I only have to learn it once. Is that too much to ask?

(Example: I still think in months when someone is pregnant. She says she's 14 weeks along . . . and I'm struggling to do the conversion in my head.)

I was living in England during the time they converted over from Pounds, Shillings, and Pence, to a metricized currency of Pounds and New Pence. The old system was convoluted and through historical accretion had a large number of currency words. The prices went from something like 2 Pounds, 6 Shillings, and 4 pence, to 2.35. It was quite wrenching at the time, with many places displaying both prices at the same time. An interviewer on the BBC had a news story about the whole thing in which, predictably, one of the elderly people interviewed said that "they ought to wait until all the old people die off, first!"

[Brenda]

I was living in England during the time they converted over from Pounds, Shillings, and Pence, to a metricized currency of Pounds and New Pence. The old system was convoluted and through historical accretion had a large number of currency words. The prices went from something like 2 Pounds, 6 Shillings, and 4 pence, to 2.35. It was quite wrenching at the time, with many places displaying both prices at the same time. An interviewer on the BBC had a news story about the whole thing in which, predictably, one of the elderly people interviewed said that "they ought to wait until all the old people die off, first!"

Funny! But yeah ... Works for me!

[Avatar4321]

The idea of a single universal language would be a good idea. I have no doubt that when the time comes we will be speaking one language.

[USU78]

Oh, wow. I had something similar going on. I learned the old German Gothic handwriting and started writing my missionary journal in it! In English, mostly. Turned out later that learning it was important, because much of my ancestry is German, and researching old German records has been greatly assisted by having learned it. On the other hand, there are going to be hard moments to some of my descendants when they try to read my missionary journal!

Kewl! I bought a book on how to write in the old "Corinthian" script in Vienna and taught myself how to write that way with the help of an elderly member lady. I wrote a couple of themes in an undergrad German class in it and drove my poor prof crazy. Called it "diese abscheuliche alte Schrift!"

I've also found it useful in records extraction.

[Kenngo1969]

... Thanks Pahoran, fixed the typos. ...

Harold - Herald (Canadian ignorance)

Canadi-yuns, ignernt? Whodathunk?!

[OnHech]

I was living in England during the time they converted over from Pounds, Shillings, and Pence, to a metricized currency of Pounds and New Pence. The old system was convoluted and through historical accretion had a large number of currency words. The prices went from something like 2 Pounds, 6 Shillings, and 4 pence, to 2.35. It was quite wrenching at the time, with many places displaying both prices at the same time. An interviewer on the BBC had a news story about the whole thing in which, predictably, one of the elderly people interviewed said that "they ought to wait until all the old people die off, first!"

Being a 22 year old from Canada I have had the benefit from growing up in the intuitive metric system. It is great, I served a mission in Las Vegas though and the metric system is very... not intuitive - 5280 feet in mile? Where the heck did they pull that number from? It interests me that the whole world (save the US, Myanmar, and Liberia)(see Map + short article) have changed over, yet Americans still cling to the old ways just suck it up and change. It will only hurt for a few years.

The idea of a single universal language would be a good idea. I have no doubt that when the time comes we will be speaking one language.

I think so to! I bet that will be the Adamic language. Speaking of, I know there are a few words that are confirmed Adamic (from revelation) such as Adam ondi ahman. Does anyone know of any others?