Linguistic Secrets of American English: the World-Rare Sound Hidden in Daily Speech

Dive deep into Linguistic Secrets of American English: the World-Rare Sound Hidden in Daily Speech in this comprehensive feature.

The mismatch between spoken English sounds and Latin alphabet spelling created headaches for centuries. In the mid-19th century, leaders in the Utah territory attempted an audacious linguistic fix: the Deseret alphabet.

Between 1854 and 1869, Brigham Young and the board of regents at the University of Deseret developed an entirely novel 38-character script. Their explicit goal was phonetic truth. They wanted a system where every distinct spoken phoneme held a single, unvarying symbol, enabling immigrants and children to read English exactly as it rolled off the tongue.

Deseret books, primers, and excerpts of the Book of Mormon printed in 1868 and 1869 tried to capture every rhotic shift, dipthong, and subtle vowel variation heard in American conversation. Yet the script failed commercially and socially. The carved characters lacked visual distinction, printing types were expensive to cast, and native readers bristled at seeing their fluid, context-dependent accents locked into rigid phonetic glyphs. By 1870, the Deseret alphabet collapsed under its own weight, leaving English spelling messy but proving how difficult it is to trap fluid speech in ink.