Stories: Church plans to aquire Mongolian alphabet-1993
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| In 1993 the Church's typesetting section workers had one of the world's largest array of international type at their fingertips. The Lord commanded "that every man shall hear the fulness of the gospel in his own tongue, and in his own language. . . ." (D&C 90:11.)
But, their supply of alphabet characters was not complete. They needed five more alphabets before they could begin to fulfill the Lord's command. It is believed that few entities in the world, if any, have such a collection of type. Only five alphabets remain to complete the worldwide collection.
There were 18 alphabets or "writing systems," with many variations of each, on hand and ready for use in 1993. Among the writing systems are: Arabic, Armenian, Cyrillic (for such languages as Russian and Ukranian), Devanagari (for a few of India's 15 official language scripts), Georgian, Greek, Hebrew and Roman. Each system may accommodate dozens of languages. These may range from little-written dialects of the highlands of Guatemala to languages of ancient tribes of the Near East, to the swirly scripts of India.
The five alphabets whose characters remain uncaptured are obscure and distant. Four of
these are well-established: Mongolian (Mongolia); Oriya (Orissa state of India); Gujarati (Gujarat State in India); and Burmese (Burma). However, the fifth - Divehi, an Arabic-based language from the Maldive Islands, is presently being acquired from mimeographed newspapers and linguists. These five alphabets will be completed in about two years (1995).
From: ALPHABETS OF WORLD AT FINGERTIP BY JOHN L. HART, Church News Staff Writer; LDS Church News Archives, Saturday, May 15, 1993
http://www.desnews.com/cgi-bin/libstory_church?dn93&9305170112 |
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