First Day of School in Deseret

Are you familiar with the Deseret alphabet? It was introduced shortly after the Saints arrived in Salt Lake as a phonetic means to read and write English. Brigham Young hoped it would help converts who spoke other languages better learn English. To understand why such an alphabet might be necessary, you don't have to look far, shoot, consider the word "phonetic," for example.

A major breakthrough in my efforts to learn a second language, came when I had the epiphany that there wasn't a right way and wrong way to construct a language and if there was a right way, it certainly wasn't English. Once I realized that, I stopped protesting every time I came upon a grammar rule that didn't correlate with the way we do things in English.

While it was quite audacious that Brigham Young and his friends thought that they could create a new means of learning English full cloth, it also shows a surprising bit of humility on their part to recognize how truly messed up the English language is.