John H. Jenkins wrote:

>
> On Jul 9, 2006, at 7:24 PM, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> > No idea what you're referring to (no, I won't click the link), but if
> > it's printing the texts in the Deseret instead of the roman alphabet,
> > then that's nothing but font substitution.
> >
>
> No, because the Deseret Alphabet isn't a cypher for Latin. It's a
> completely different beast, intended to provide a phonetic spelling
> of English. (If nothing else, it has twelve more letters.) You can't
> convert from Latin to Deseret without knowing how to pronounce the
> words.
>
> What's being referred to was a project I undertook some years back to
> convert the non-Biblical LDS scriptures from Latin to Deseret, about
> eight hundred pages' worth of text. The point is that conversion
> from non-phonetic Latin to phonetic Deseret really didn't take that
> much effort.

(Wny?)

> > I have no idea why font-engineers are so fascinated by Deseret. It's
> > never been used for anything.
>
> Well, it's never been used for anything terribly important. Probably
> the most surprising (and useful) DA text is an English-Hopi
> dictionary that Ken Beesley found in the LDS Church Archives, with
> the DA used for Hopi. It antedates any other record of Hopi
> phonetics by the better part of a century.

Has it proved to be of any use to Hopi scholarship?
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...