The Deseret Alphabet (feat. Ryan Shosted and Neal Davis)

The Deseret Alphabet is one of the most fascinating, original orthographies to come out of American history. But little research has been done into the exact origins of the alphabet, its religious and cultural significance, and its evolution in the digital era. 

Linguist Ryan Shosted and computer language designer Neal Davis deliver the most comprehensive study of the Deseret Alphabet's history and functionality in their 2026 book The Deseret Alphabet: A Fixed and Unalterable Sound. Shosted and Davis join host Nicholas Shrum on this episode of Scholars & Saints to discuss the contested historiography of the alphabet, probe it's phoneticization of English and the nature of linguistic representation, explain the orthography's revival in the digital era, and explore the cultural significance of the alphabet's use for Mormons, Utahans, and the American West more broadly.

Ryan K. Shosted is a Professor of Linguistics and the Director of the Chin-Woo Kim Phonetics Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where he studies phonetics, phonology, Hittite and Cuneiform, as well as the Deseret Alphabet. 

Neal Davis is an educator, engineer, and computer language designer. He has previously taught computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and worked as a developer and software engineer for organizations like the Urbit Foundation and Zorp Corp. 

Transcript

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00;00;02;02 - 00;00;32;03

Nicholas Shrum

You're listening to Scholars and Saints. The UVA mormon studies podcast. I'm your host, Nicholas Shrum, a PhD candidate in American religions at the University of Virginia. On this podcast, we dive into the academic study of Mormonism. We engage recent and classic scholarship, interview prominent and up and coming thinkers in the field, and reflect on Mormonism relevance to the broader study of religion, scholars, and saints is brought to you by support from the Richard Lyman Bushman Endowed Professorship of Mormon Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.

00;00;32;09 - 00;01;00;07

Nicholas Shrum

The podcast goal is to discuss some of the most pressing issues in cutting edge methods in Mormon studies, and put them in conversation with scholarship from the discipline of religious studies. While the podcast content explores Mormonism, the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any organizations they represent or study, including The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints and the University of Virginia.

00;01;04;22 - 00;01;38;25

Nicholas Shrum

Today on the podcast, we look into an extraordinary linguistic experiment that shaped the cultural and religious identity of 19th century Latter day Saints. The Deseret alphabet was a 25 year effort designed to finesse size the English language and capture human speech as it was actually spoken. The development of an and surprising digital afterlife of this phonetic script are the subjects of exciting scholarly analysis by linguist Ryan and computer language designer Neal Davis in their recent book, The Deseret Alphabet A Fixed and Unalterable Sound, published with the University of Illinois Press.

00;01;38;25 - 00;02;07;00

Nicholas Shrum

Drawing on major archival discoveries such as the 1853 Flower Note, as well as interdisciplinary linguistic and computational analysis, Shasta Dean Davis explored the formal mechanics, Pitman phono influences, and material print culture of the alphabet. The authors argue that far from being a simple static failure or secret code, the Desert alphabet was a dynamic, multi-layered endeavor that continues to thrive today as an icon of LDS heritage, cultural distinction, and artistic reclamation.

00;02;07;01 - 00;02;28;11

Nicholas Shrum

It's a fascinating conversation about linguistics and theology, print culture and community building, and the ways that written symbols shape religious identity and cultural memory across generations. I hope you'll enjoy this conversation with Ryan and Neal Davis.

00;02;28;13 - 00;02;55;07

Nicholas Shrum

Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Scholars and Saints, the University of Virginia mormon studies podcast. I'm very excited and honored to have two wonderful authors of a recent book published with the University of Illinois Press entitled The Deseret Alphabet A Fixed and Unalterable Sound. The authors today are Ryan K stead, who is a professor of linguistics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and coauthor as well.

00;02;55;08 - 00;03;17;22

Nicholas Shrum

Neal Davis, who is an educator, engineer, computer language designer. I'm in a former computer science professor who wears a lot of hats, and so this will be a really exciting conversation to talk about a fairly lesser known part of Mormon history and contemporary Mormon culture, as the book discusses. And so welcome to the podcast, to the both of you.

00;03;18;00 - 00;03;19;25

Ryan Shosted

Thanks for having us.

00;03;19;27 - 00;03;21;11

Neal Davis

Yeah. It's fantastic.

00;03;21;14 - 00;03;32;28

Nicholas Shrum

To start off, I would love to have the audience here a little bit more about both of your backgrounds, education, interests, and current pursuits. Maybe we could start with Ryan.

00;03;33;00 - 00;03;56;22

Ryan Shosted

Sure. So I am a trained as an experimental fanatic and kind of the British institutional tradition, which in fact kind of relates me collateral to Isaac Pitman. Those one of the, you know, the predecessors of the Deseret alphabet, great influence on the desert alphabet. But, you know, I teach my students how to use something called the International Phonetic Alphabet.

00;03;56;22 - 00;04;22;16

Ryan Shosted

And in some ways it is related to the Deseret alphabet, not as a kind of direct ancestry, but again, a kind of collateral relationship. A lot of people were interested in developing for writing down human speech phonetically in the 19th century. And yeah, I'm part of that intellectual tradition in my my work as a phonetic at the University of Illinois.

00;04;22;19 - 00;04;24;25

Nicholas Shrum

Excellent. Thank you. And Neal.

00;04;24;27 - 00;04;52;07

Neal Davis

Yeah, I've been working on a number of different projects for the past few years in computing and symbolic representations, and it hasn't been until recently that I've I've been able to explain, I think, the inner unity of it that makes things like computer like design and the desert alphabet and some of the others both work. I've been working on cohere as a unit.

00;04;52;10 - 00;05;17;24

Neal Davis

You know, I started in conventional engineering, nuclear engineering, and became very interested in why mathematical models described the world. And this is just sort of elaborated into this, you know, effectively following project to trying to understand how we represent the things around us, how we manipulate the things around us. You know, as you can imagine, this touches on linguistics.

00;05;17;24 - 00;05;46;11

Neal Davis

This touches on scientific modeling, this touches on computing. Just this, this fundamental problem of, you know, try and try to intellectually attack why we can represent things at all and why some representations work better than others. And what is it exactly that we're doing when we try to build these representations? And, you know, it's the same as the same game they're playing with the Jesuit alphabet in a very particular slice of that question.

00;05;46;12 - 00;06;20;18

Neal Davis

You know, they're trying to say, how do you represent certainly sail on perhaps human thought in various ways, but they're they're grappling with this same the same aspect of it. And, you know, it occurs to me you mentioned the full title of the book with the subtitle fixed in an ultra sound. Right? And I chose that subtitle not only because it's a direct quote from a letter, but in a sense, it's also a deeply ironic subtitle at several levels, because language itself does not remain fixed in an alter.

00;06;20;25 - 00;06;37;06

Neal Davis

The desert alphabet itself was unable to be either fixed or unalterable, or to enable language to remain such. And so, you know, the ambition itself sort of sort of villages, the, the thing that they're trying to do with it.

00;06;37;08 - 00;07;04;18

Nicholas Shrum

Well, these are, you know, two really fascinating skill sets that both of you bring to, to something that I think and we'll, we'll introduce the audience to what the desert alphabet is in just a moment. But I think, you know, talking about representation of language, how we're able to represent ideas through, through, through sound and that kind of thing has also an engineering and linguistics context, but also big implications for religion.

00;07;04;18 - 00;07;29;22

Nicholas Shrum

And I'm trying to remember if we've had more linguistic approaches to religion on the podcast before, I'm sure we have the previous podcast host. Even Betts had had a background in linguistics and and is quite interested in that. But this is just, I think, an exciting and cool way for the audience to see how Mormon studies can go into these different fields that that I myself and totally, you know, ignorant of.

00;07;29;22 - 00;07;51;03

Nicholas Shrum

And so it was actually very interesting to read this book and get a flavor for what that looks like. So if, if we could, I would love to have just kind of a brief explanation. We've alluded to it already, but what the desert alphabet was and is currently and either one of you please feel free to to start off.

00;07;51;05 - 00;08;17;19

Ryan Shosted

Well, I guess I'll go. We can maybe go back and forth as far as that makes sense, but feel free to jump in. Neal. Obviously. So the desert alphabet is a writing system that is basis, right? So it's a symbolic writing system that was developed not entirely out of whole cloth and not entirely out of a cultural context in which this was an interesting thing to happen.

00;08;17;23 - 00;08;47;10

Ryan Shosted

But it is a writing system intended to phonetic size English primarily, but also other languages, meaning that the writing system itself enables people to write the way they talk. So we all know that there are plenty of ways to get confused with English spelling. That's why spelling bees exist as an opportunity for people to memorize how to spell words.

00;08;47;13 - 00;09;16;28

Ryan Shosted

And that's all very much a creation of the early modern in the modern era. Because, you know, traditionally most people were illiterate, so it didn't even matter, right? So literacy itself is a problem that a lot of people were. A lot of reformers, including religious reformers, were very interested in confronting in the 19th century. And it has everything to do with the ability of people to read the word of God.

00;09;17;01 - 00;09;43;26

Ryan Shosted

And, and so and to read it naturally and to read it in a way that everybody can understand. It fits very well in with with Mormon ethos and with many of the other goals of that era. But ultimately that's what it is. It's a writing system, and it is not a dead writing system. We want to make sure that people understand that, but people are using the Deseret alphabet and will very likely continue to use the Deseret alphabet.

00;09;43;29 - 00;10;18;00

Neal Davis

Yeah. The problem that any writing was trying to solve is fundamentally, how do you communicate an idea to another person. And some writing systems try to do this by writing down symbols. You have a local graphic systems where the thing you write down doesn't map directly to a vocalization. You know it does indirectly. You know, you memorize the meaning of a Chinese character, for instance, but you can't read it.

00;10;18;06 - 00;10;56;12

Neal Davis

The pronunciation out of the symbol. And of course, as the romance languages, the Latin and its successors were written down, they were written down in various layers over time, and the alphabet itself changed around them. The the conventions of pronunciation change or conventions of writing changed. And the desert alphabet is, you know, like I said, it's a writing system, but it's fundamentally one answer to this question of if you're trying to capture what is essential about language, you have to answer for yourself the question of what do you think is essential?

00;10;56;12 - 00;11;19;28

Neal Davis

And why do you think that's the thing that has to be communicated? You know, you could imagine a different world in which, you know, they created like a, like a, like a mandarin English. And there were symbols or hieroglyphs for every single concept in English instead of what they, what they chose to do was to capture the sound of English with as much fidelity as they could imagine.

00;11;19;28 - 00;11;50;23

Neal Davis

And of course, there's a lot of argument over time. It's going on in the broader cultural context about orthographic reform in general, but people are arguing about how many constituent sounds are in a word like mouth. And you can certainly imagine someone sitting there around their fire in 1824, and they're sitting there and they're bored to tears, and they're just like now mouths, not the.

00;11;50;25 - 00;12;05;13

Neal Davis

Oh that's three. I'm going to write an article arguing that there are three sounds in the vowel. And now and this this goes on for decades. Really. I mean, Ryan's the fun. I imagine it probably persists to this day in some forms.

00;12;05;15 - 00;12;32;21

Ryan Shosted

It absolutely people in phonetics still. You know, I had a graduate student a few years ago working on this wonderfully complex, experimental acoustic approach to understanding the vowels of English and the vowels of Mandarin Chinese. And what happens when one person learns one code versus the other? And the very basic question that I had to keep coming back to, to my student with was how many vowels are there?

00;12;32;22 - 00;12;59;25

Ryan Shosted

What are the objects of comparison? What are we actually comparing? Because vowels themselves exist in a in a continuous acoustic space, but we attempt to put them a discrete symbolic value associated with them, and that naturally results in a loss of information. And that loss of information is precisely what linguists are so often interested in getting at. What makes me sound like me?

00;12;59;25 - 00;13;33;28

Ryan Shosted

What makes Neal sound like Neal? What makes Nicholas sound like Nicholas? Those are the features of of of language that are really actually very, very important and shouldn't be ignored. And yet our writing system, generally speaking, just completely ignores them. That has advantages, which is we can communicate with each other quickly and efficiently using writing, but it comes with all other manner of of drawbacks as well, particularly for people who are interested in examining language as a as a scientific object.

00;13;34;00 - 00;13;53;05

Nicholas Shrum

Well, thank you both for that introduction to what the desert alphabet is. Before we start diving into more of the content of the book, I wonder if you can if there's a sense that you can give the audience of what the origin story of the project was, how did the both of you arrive at at an academic analysis of the desert alphabet?

00;13;53;07 - 00;14;15;11

Ryan Shosted

Well, for me, it had a lot to do with the pandemic. So I'm an experimental phonetic, and I work in a laboratory and we bring people in to record them, and we use various devices to do so. And, you know, you can kind of think of the phonetic in My Fair Lady kind of thing, right? And it's, it's it's not all that different any longer.

00;14;15;15 - 00;14;36;08

Ryan Shosted

But in any event, I couldn't do that because we couldn't have proximity with people by virtue of the regulations at the university at the time. And so I don't know exactly how, but I decided to start reading the Book of Mormon in the Deseret alphabet, knowing that, you know, having all the always been kind of passing familiar with it.

00;14;36;08 - 00;15;01;29

Ryan Shosted

I grew up in Salt Lake City, and so going to public school, you know, they probably took us on a tour of the beehive House or something like that. And I saw it and was aware of its existence. I never realized, though, that it was. I guess it never clicked with me that it was a phonetic alphabet, and that therefore what started getting me interested was the idea that it as a phonetic alphabet, as a way of preserving the way people actually talk, rather than the way the dictionary tells you.

00;15;01;29 - 00;15;24;11

Ryan Shosted

You should spell a word that the the desert alphabet documents could potentially record information about how early Utahns spoke. And that was really kind of right up my alley. So I thought, well, I'm going to kind of dig into this. The Deseret Alphabet Book of Mormon is probably not the right document for looking at that, because it was very heavily edited.

00;15;24;12 - 00;15;44;05

Ryan Shosted

However, there's plenty of other desert alphabet documents, and they do in fact contain traces of how people speak. So in some senses, for me, it was a a low tech approach to what I had been doing that was precipitated by events completely beyond our control.

00;15;44;08 - 00;16;15;07

Neal Davis

I had been aware of the desert alphabet for, you know, probably at least a couple of decades. At that point. I had run across it, incidentally, and some old church materials I couldn't even tell you where and filed it away is just one of these curiosities that deserves some some further examination. So when when Ryan started that project, I started poking around in what things had actually been published.

00;16;15;07 - 00;16;42;02

Neal Davis

In it, Ryan had started to do a hand transcription of the desert alphabet at some point in this, in this era. And so there was material for me coming from a computer science perspective to start looking at, okay, there's an encoding, there are fonts, there are ways of writing this down. You know, we can we can write down other manuscripts as they come into our knowledge.

00;16;42;02 - 00;17;12;05

Neal Davis

And it really ballooned from there. And it was it was somewhere along this road, probably around, I'd say it was probably early 2022 when we, when you and I were talking and we realized that there had never been a full book written on this topic. And moreover, if there was ever going to be a full book, it would probably just be because a couple of people with some professional background that made it possible to do so just wrote the book.

00;17;12;07 - 00;17;32;13

Neal Davis

And at that point, the logic started to become an extra that we would probably, you know, it started to feel like we had to do this thing like this. This book had to come out of the work and investigation that we've been doing at that time. And, you know, around that time we had been talking about doing some transcriptions of some other existing documents.

00;17;32;13 - 00;17;56;26

Neal Davis

We began to catalog some of the things that were out there, which is the work that became what we call the Illinois Desert Consortium. And then it really started to focus into, you know, what would a book that attempted to tell this whole remarkable story look like? And, of course, at that time, we were still in the vein that this was purely an orthographic reform project.

00;17;56;26 - 00;18;23;17

Neal Davis

We knew there were other arguments that had been put forward, such as secrecy, or that can be difficult for Mormons to read what they call gentile literature at the time. And it was only through the course of doing the research into what they had said contemporaneously about the book, that it really started to unfold for us that this was a vastly more ambitious project than I think anyone in the 20th century or later had really come to realize at that point.

00;18;23;18 - 00;18;26;10

Neal Davis

And, you know, for me, that that set the hook.

00;18;26;14 - 00;18;50;21

Nicholas Shrum

Excellent. I mean this to to my knowledge, it's the most thorough investigation of the desert alphabet. And so kudos to the both of you for taking this on. And it will be, I think, a standard work for anytime any scholar ever mentions or alludes to the desert alphabet will have to consider the arguments that both of you put forward in this book.

00;18;50;24 - 00;19;12;05

Nicholas Shrum

So just launching into some of the specifics of this book, I wanted to start with, maybe some people are familiar with the desert alphabet and kind of the timeline that it falls into in Mormon history, but in the book, you challenge what might be considered a traditional timeline of of the creation of the alphabet. What if you can tell us about what's called the flower note?

00;19;12;06 - 00;19;33;18

Nicholas Shrum

Flower right flower note from March 1853? And I'm wondering if you can say how that document changes our understanding of who actually invented the script. You know, there's kind of this debate between George de what and W.W. Phelps, who people might be familiar with and just wonder if we can kind of address this question of timeline and creation.

00;19;33;21 - 00;19;59;08

Ryan Shosted

Yeah. So this was definitely if there was an Indiana Jones moment in this work, this was it. So I was sitting in the church history library going through the George Doyle papers, and these have not been made available online yet for some reason. And so physically they had to be gone through. And I was sitting there and I come across this little unobtrusive document.

00;19;59;08 - 00;20;23;14

Ryan Shosted

It looks like it's about the size of a thank you note, and it's in an envelope. And the outside of it makes it clear that it's addressed to Brigham Young, and it's written in a form of the desert alphabet. I could read it with a little effort, but it wasn't the same as George. What's kind of mature cursive in the Deseret alphabet, which I was also familiar with and which is actually, frankly, more difficult to read.

00;20;23;17 - 00;20;50;23

Ryan Shosted

And this note, when you open it up, it's this kind of compelling and even a little sad note from George. What to who is Brigham Young, one of Brigham Young secretaries written to from George Wallet to Brigham Young. And he's imploring Brigham Young to provide his destitute mother with some flour. Again, flour because, you know, in about in the early 1850s, this was.

00;20;50;26 - 00;21;08;26

Ryan Shosted

These were the these were the hungry years in, in the Salt Lake Valley. Right. And so he's going to the man who has the most possible power and is asking for him to intercede on behalf of his mother. So it's a it's a very interesting document from a lot of different points of view, including that. But of course, we were very interested in the orthography.

00;21;08;26 - 00;21;32;13

Ryan Shosted

I'm reading the note, of course, it's very short. We publish it in an image of it in the book, and I'm looking at the date. The date says March 1853. And I started sweating a little bit because this is essentially too early. So I called over Brian Pasadena, who's one of the archivists and a good friend at the Church History Library, said, Brian, I'm not going to tell you what this is.

00;21;32;14 - 00;22;00;16

Ryan Shosted

I just want you to look at it and tell you what it says. And I was shaking at that point and he said, it's 1853, Ryan. And I said, okay, it's March 1853. Well, why is that a problem for anybody who knows? Well, there's not many of us. For those of us who know the law of the desert alphabet, we know that the really serious deliberations about the alphabet took place in the winter, the early winter, November and December of 1853.

00;22;00;17 - 00;22;24;02

Ryan Shosted

That's when they kind of came. They were they were booting around and kicking around other ideas for other kinds of alphabets, including just adopting Pitman's alphabet. So 8 or 9 months before that, George, what is communicating in a pretty lackadaisical manner with Brigham Young? This is just it's another note. There clearly were other such notes, but they haven't survived.

00;22;24;02 - 00;22;54;27

Ryan Shosted

And it's written in a way that is clear that it's a kind of proto Deseret. It's not exactly the desert alphabet that was used and discussed in, say, March of 1854. If the if the date, if the as some have suggested, that the note was just miss mislabeled. We just don't believe that that's the case because of, you know, the epigraphical evidence.

00;22;54;29 - 00;23;16;25

Ryan Shosted

So what does this do? Well, it says that before the University of Deseret Regents were seriously discussing the form of the alphabet that was going to take shape, and which is fairly well documented again in, in November, late fall, early winter 1853.

00;23;16;27 - 00;23;36;09

Neal Davis

Yeah. I think, you know, we have the story of the flower. I want to back up a little bit more and talk about an interesting problem we had in writing this book, because it is the first book length treatment. And if you wanted to know the history of the desert previously, you had to cobble it together from a number of sources.

00;23;36;09 - 00;24;15;01

Neal Davis

There had been some articles and venues like the Improvement ERA, the Friend. There had been a number of student papers on our species. Master's thesis one one PhD dissertation in the 80s, which had which had worked out the story. There was there was some early work, but I don't want to talk about it a little bit in like the 1940s, but essentially there there was a received story of the desert alphabet, which is more or less what you would read on Wikipedia, you know, circa 2020.

00;24;15;03 - 00;24;52;29

Neal Davis

And we had to address this, received a story and give it its fair accounting while also addressing some of the the shortcoming visions that were necessary in that story. So, Ryan. Ryan called this shadow boxing with the first edition that doesn't exist, which which was a very interesting problem to have. And this is one of those places where that comes forward, where, you know, there is there is a scholarly received consensus around the Deseret alphabet being produced through deliberations in late 1853.

00;24;53;00 - 00;25;32;03

Neal Davis

In early 1854, the first specimens of the alphabet appeared, as produced by the University of Desert Board of Regents. And then these are disseminated. And there's there's a lot of early, you know, primitive, you know, relatively exploratory finds in the desert alphabet through 1855, 1856. Here. One of the things that we uncovered during the research for this is that while they were doing the early discussions around the language, this is all in the context of, in particular, Brigham Young calling for calling for some sort of improved language.

00;25;32;04 - 00;25;52;04

Neal Davis

And so he would he would go into general conference and other conferences, and he would talk about how, you know, if I had the language of angels and I could speak straight into your minds and there would be no confusion about what was being said. And he brings this up periodically for for years, this comes up until the end of his life.

00;25;52;06 - 00;26;24;19

Neal Davis

And others like Orson Pratt, engaged with it, sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely. Several alphabet proposals had been put forward by various parties. Liam had put one forward, John Vance had put one forward, and there had been what we call a mormon phono type alphabet that survived. And there's there's some documents in that which we reproduced in the book, and there's a lot of debate about where these were these acceptable.

00;26;24;20 - 00;26;53;03

Neal Davis

And sometimes the the council would, would say, okay, this is fine. And then some new person, Willard Richards or Brigham Young, would show up and be like, this is all trash, and I hate it, and I will, I don't I don't ever want to see this again. And one of the very interesting things about reading the meeting minutes is seeing the very strong personalities that are that are coming into contact with each other as they work through this problem.

00;26;53;05 - 00;27;45;13

Neal Davis

And what we end up hypothesizing for various reasons, including the fact that during his lifetime, the Desert alphabets primary authorship was ascribed to William W Phelps. We ended up hypothesizing that the actual author of the desert alphabet is not completely clear, and there is evidence in favor of both What and Phelps. In that regard, we tend to lean towards the hypothesis that the alphabet that Phelps introduced early was adopted by lot and modified, and that this effectively is what became the earliest version of the Deseret alphabet in the form that he was using in March 1853, and is the thing that was ultimately adopted by the University of Desert Board of Regents.

00;27;45;19 - 00;27;56;04

Neal Davis

The full attribution of the authorship to what does not occur until 1885 1883. When. When is the letter?

00;27;56;11 - 00;28;00;19

Ryan Shosted

It's that era. It's. It's a letter to the Bancroft. Yeah.

00;28;00;22 - 00;28;01;26

Neal Davis

Much, much later.

00;28;02;00 - 00;28;23;16

Ryan Shosted

Right. So if I can just jump in again, this is a complex question. Sorry for taking so much time with it, but it's almost like we're we're by talking about a lot of people aren't familiar with the alphabet at all, let alone the controversy over who created it. What's really super important to understand is that no one took credit for it.

00;28;23;17 - 00;28;44;14

Ryan Shosted

No one took credit for it at the time there. You know, there's plenty of reportage about it. And they never say this was invented by George Duke or this was invented by William W Phelps, or this was invented even by if if it's attributed to anyone obliquely, it's attributed to Brigham Young himself and the regents of the University of Deseret.

00;28;44;14 - 00;29;08;29

Ryan Shosted

And of course, they're doing that out of deference to the brother Brigham, so that that makes sense. But even there, they're not really saying yes, brother Brigham had a revelation and he received the alphabet, you know, or something like that. They never go that far. But in, in in fact, that leaves the space open. And by leaving that kind of that fertile imaginative space open, people come up with their own ideas.

00;29;08;29 - 00;29;32;08

Ryan Shosted

And as Neal mentioned, both Remy and the Voyager paid moment and Burton in the city of the Saints, they both attribute it to William W Phelps. And that's a lot closer in time. The alphabet was still being used, and Burton even had an interview with W.W. Phelps, who he called the Little Monty. He got a little carried away with things.

00;29;32;08 - 00;29;58;00

Ryan Shosted

He was exaggerating. He makes he makes the point that in Great Salt Lake City that referred to W.W. Phelps as the devil because he played Lucifer in the temple drama. So he and then he says, and this gentleman invented the Deseret alphabet. So my guess is the W.W. Phelps claimed that in his interview with Burton. And what did W.W. Phelps invent that we know of for sure?

00;29;58;03 - 00;30;20;15

Ryan Shosted

He invented in 1853 years before what we're talking about. He invented something he called the Mormon alphabet and brought it to the regents of the University of Deseret. And Brigham Young dismissed it. He said, that's not what I want, because, as Neal said, Brigham was still of the mind that he wanted the language of heaven. He wanted. We'll get into this later.

00;30;20;15 - 00;30;53;12

Ryan Shosted

But he wanted a revealed language. He wanted something that was much more in line with the the, the imagination, the visions of Joseph Smith about language. And he hadn't quite gotten through that yet. He wasn't ready to settle for an alphabet yet. And yet W.W. Phelps absolutely presented an alphabet to the regions. We know nothing about it. That's the sad part, is we know nothing else about it except that it was presented and that presumably it was a phonetic alphabet based on the kind of discussions they were having at the time.

00;30;53;17 - 00;31;18;08

Ryan Shosted

So after that happens, the first recorded document, the first dated document is the 1853 flower note. So was George what using the thing that W.W. Phelps had invented and that it was being passed around in the interim? We simply don't know. But it's worth recalling that W.W. Phelps was a regent of the University of Deseret. You know, W.W. Phelps had his history with the church.

00;31;18;08 - 00;31;37;24

Ryan Shosted

He had his history with Brigham Young. He had his history with Joseph Smith. It's all quite complicated. But he was regarded as an intellectual. He regarded himself as an intellectual. He was very interested in ancient language, as an ancient script and all this kind of stuff. And Georgie, what was a stand for a wonderful guy, very interesting guy.

00;31;37;26 - 00;32;04;25

Ryan Shosted

You know, I hate to think I might ruin relationships with some of his descendants who I went to high school with, because we're not really taking the position that we know for sure. We're we're pointing out that there's an ambiguity in the historical record. And while plenty of people will want to say that, George, what invented it and perhaps some other people might want to say that W.W. Phelps invented it, and who knows, somebody could come up with another theory.

00;32;04;27 - 00;32;38;04

Ryan Shosted

The point is that the historical record doesn't have the smoking gun in it. The closest we have are a secondary reports. They're all secondary reports. Right. We have some early secondary reports that say it was W.W. Phelps, and we have later secondary report reports. Well, it's a letter from Franklin D Richards. Right. And maybe that's why it gets more credibility, but he himself is quoting someone else who was a secretary of Brigham Young in writing the letter and attributing it to George Duke.

00;32;38;06 - 00;32;48;24

Ryan Shosted

So the historiography around it is really complicated. And we found a new document that makes it even more complicated, I guess. Is the short story there? Well.

00;32;48;24 - 00;33;09;14

Nicholas Shrum

I appreciate both of you going into the weeds on this. And there's the reason I wanted to start with this question, because I think that this, this episode and the work that the both of you have done with you call it an Indiana Jones moment, which I think is awesome, and maybe you'll have another Indiana Jones moment when somebody discovers the 1850 W.W. Phelps proposal for a mormon alphabet.

00;33;09;14 - 00;33;40;23

Nicholas Shrum

But I think that this is an interesting episode to to really start talking about the Deseret alphabet and its history and what comes later is that because of that ambiguity, it opens up so much of questions of attribution of, you know, the relationship of it to these more theological concepts of like a divine or a language carrying on a tradition from Joseph Smith and those, those kinds of things and this, this, this moment in the 1850s in Utah, as you mentioned, these are the hungry years.

00;33;40;23 - 00;34;05;27

Nicholas Shrum

This is a leading up to or during the Mormon Reformation. This is a high moment of Mormon cultural creation. And so I think this is just a fascinating episode. And and maybe we can go back just a little bit of a step. And this was alluded to in mentioned with Isaac Pitman. But you trace the roots of the Deseret alphabet back to Isaac Pitman's English alphabet.

00;34;05;28 - 00;34;19;24

Nicholas Shrum

And so maybe just another question is how how much of the desert alphabet was actually new and original versus an adaptation of existing British shorthand and phonetic reform movements?

00;34;19;26 - 00;34;45;16

Ryan Shosted

Okay. So two things that that do get confused in the literature, and we hope to clarify this. We were even confused at the beginning. It's it's it's a very abstruse topic. Isaac Pitman really invented two things. He invented a shorthand system. And George, what was was educated in that system. Very interesting. And he used shorthand to write down addresses that were made by general authorities in Nauvoo.

00;34;45;17 - 00;35;13;27

Ryan Shosted

When he when he emigrated from Great Britain, he came to Nauvoo. And, you know, he he intersected with the life of Joseph Smith. How well he knew him. We don't I don't know for sure, but any any of it. He was writing down Nauvoo era addresses in something called Pitman shorthand. Pitman shorthand is a phonetic shorthand. And it's there's lots and lots of documents in the church history library, in the archives that are written in Pitman shorthand.

00;35;13;28 - 00;35;36;15

Ryan Shosted

Login. Purcell. Carruth, who was a wonderful person who has become a great and dear friend of both Neale and mine in the course of working on this, is perhaps the only person who can read this, this stuff. Right. So Pitman shorthand is different. It's wonderful. It's wild, it's fascinating. It's and it has a kind of similar lineage because Pitman was also interested in printing.

00;35;36;15 - 00;36;08;08

Ryan Shosted

So shorthand was shorthand. It had its purposes. But, you know, it's the 19th century. Printing technology is becoming a lot more affordable. There are lots and lots of organizations, reform and religious organizations in particular that are absolutely investing in printing. And this is this is Mormonism all over, right? The idea of printing, printing, printing, printing. And they share that with all other kinds of religious and reform movements that emerge from the Second Great Awakening in the United States.

00;36;08;10 - 00;36;36;10

Ryan Shosted

It's not new to them, but, you know, that that that printing ethos continues. So Pitman develops something called the phono type, and it is in fact engraved movable type that can be used to print phonetic texts for public dissemination. That's a different purpose than the shorthand, and that's one of the reasons that they have to be kept clear and distinct from one another.

00;36;36;13 - 00;37;04;03

Ryan Shosted

George, what was absolutely, undeniably involved in in in both but his his real passion was for the shorthand. And and if you think about it, what was WWF passionate about? He was passionate about printing. He was passionate about movable type. He had been involved in the church printing and had aspirations to continue his work in the church greenery throughout his life or from, you know, from the time that he joined the church to the end of his life.

00;37;04;06 - 00;37;34;23

Ryan Shosted

And so to your question, sorry it took a while to get there. How different is Pitman's phono type than from the dessert alphabet? Linguistically, not very structurally, not very right. The sounds that were worked out, the phonetic skeleton, if you will, was worked out by Isaac Pitman and another scholar named Andrew Ellis. And or I'm blanking Ellis. Definitely.

00;37;34;23 - 00;38;09;22

Ryan Shosted

Ellis forgotten his first name, but they worked together to work out the sounds. Right. What are the sounds of English? How many vowels are there? And they debated it, right? They debated whether there was something we call the schwa, for example. And so there were little details around the edges. But the pitman system of phono type was was debated and discussed by the Regents of the University of Deseret, many of whom were, you know, apostles that people will recognize by name, like Parley Pratt, for example, Willard Richards, who was in the First Presidency at the time.

00;38;09;24 - 00;38;40;25

Ryan Shosted

There, they're debating the characteristics, the linguistic structural characteristics of Pitman's phono type, and they essentially scramble it a little bit. But they keep, you know, they make some very small linguistic changes. We discuss all of those in the book, but for a general audience, I think the larger point would be that if you read a document written in the Pitman phono type, there's lots of documents printed in the Pitman phono type.

00;38;40;28 - 00;39;06;22

Ryan Shosted

They are accessible to a reader of someone who reads in the Roman alphabet, and who can read and knows English. You can read them maybe 75% or something like that, because the letters themselves look like letters that we use every day. Pitman designed it that way because he didn't want there to be an artificial barrier. He wanted it to be based on sound, but he wanted the characteristics.

00;39;06;24 - 00;39;32;29

Ryan Shosted

He wanted it to be close enough that was identifiable. Most people look like look at a desert alphabet document. Can't decipher it. Why is that? Because the characters themselves, the letter forms are different, so the letter forms are visually. The desert alphabet is very distinct from the Bittman type, so much so that it's basically indecipherable. Now, in an afternoon, you can learn the Deseret alphabet.

00;39;32;29 - 00;40;15;29

Ryan Shosted

We're not trying to make convince anybody that it's that hard to do, but it presents this kind of barrier that the phono types, Pitman's phono type doesn't say, yeah, that's the answer, I suppose, to the question of how how different are they now? The other major difference, of course, is the world building project. Right. The theological dimensions. And while Pitman, who was an avid Swedenborgian, which is quite interesting, had kind of these reformist tendencies and was interested in, you know, perfecting various aspects of human society, including educational system and that sort of thing, all very 19th century utopian kind of stuff.

00;40;16;01 - 00;40;35;13

Ryan Shosted

The Mormons obviously took it a little bit further, because it had to do with the literal kingdom of God and the language that will be used at that point in time. So really don't want to give the impression that the the brethren absolutely just lifted it and stole it from Pitman, that it's a carbon copy of Pitman or something like that.

00;40;35;15 - 00;40;57;05

Ryan Shosted

They debated it, they discussed it, and presumably they had reasons for every single letter, because another version they voted on, every single letter wasn't. We don't have the record of what they did with the desert alphabet. It's a it's so it's such a shame. But we don't have the minutes for when the desert alphabet itself was concurred upon by the brethren.

00;40;57;05 - 00;41;18;03

Ryan Shosted

But an earlier version of something they debated. They voted on every single letter, which tells you how seriously they took it and how much they believed that. Sure, they were taking something that Isaac Pitman had invented. Nobody denied that. In fact, they pointed out in The Desert News on various occasions, but they had put their special touch on it.

00;41;18;04 - 00;41;27;15

Ryan Shosted

Right? They had it. They had sanctified it. They had done something to it to consecrate it to the work of.

00;41;27;17 - 00;41;30;29

Ryan Shosted

The work of the restoration. You might say anything.

00;41;30;29 - 00;41;33;08

Nicholas Shrum

You would add, Neal, to that.

00;41;33;11 - 00;42;14;09

Neal Davis

The biggest edition was was definitely embedding it in this notion of a pure language or a millennial project that you're trying to accomplish something that is more than a merely human progress reform with the alphabet that you're taking, that you're you're taking into account. We can contextualize this enthusiasm that Brigham Young had for it. If we look back to the first time that Brigham Young, Joseph Smith, I believe this was 1832, he encountered Joseph Smith.

00;42;14;09 - 00;42;44;26

Neal Davis

And spontaneously at that meeting, he broke it to tongues and spoke in tongues. And Joseph Smith identified this as the first time that the language of Adam had been spoken in this dispensation. Now, Brigham was not involved with the subsequent Kirtland and Nabu era language projects. He was typically as as a member of the quorum of the 12 Apostles.

00;42;44;29 - 00;43;24;16

Neal Davis

He was far more involved with missionary efforts and organizational administrative aspects. He definitely would have been aware the things that were going on with the papyri and ultimately the publication of the Book of Abraham, the discussions that were taking place throughout this time. And there's a real sense in which what he was trying to do with the desert alphabet was a return to that same vein of a creating or recovering there, never quite clear on which they're doing.

00;43;24;17 - 00;43;48;07

Neal Davis

If they're if they're recovering a pure language, if they're a pure language. Different speakers use this in different senses, but this is definitely what they bring to the table that no one else has. They have this divine mandate to work with the English language to make it a quote, step and partial return, end quote, to to a pure language or to a divine language.

00;43;48;11 - 00;44;30;07

Neal Davis

And while it's not always clear that different thinkers in this space think that you believe that they're doing the same thing with it. They're all pulling in the same direction at least the idealists are towards this perfection of something that man received. Language. Language was confounded at the Tower of Babel, and language can be purified by the divinely guided effort of man, which is vastly more ambitious than what's fixed the spelling of the English language that is being undertaken in other quarters.

00;44;30;14 - 00;45;19;14

Nicholas Shrum

No, thank you both for, for for addressing a number of things. And again, a complex question, but kind of this millennial reform slash building off of these other non-Mormon attempts at reform and or reform. And I appreciate and Neal, for for addressing this idea of like an enemy pure language that that Brigham Young felt that it was kind of this what was it, a step impartial return is the quote that you use and and seeing it as part of a of a millennial project, I'm wondering if we can move in to kind of trying to situate the desert alphabet within the broader sense of 19th century Mormon print culture and the way that they did

00;45;19;14 - 00;45;41;10

Nicholas Shrum

religious publishing. So first, how did they understand it as part of their broader. And we've, we've we've started to address these, but kind of what did that look like? How did they start using it? What kind of projects was the desert alphabet employed into during during this this early 1850s to 1870 ish period?

00;45;41;13 - 00;45;41;23

Ryan Shosted

Right.

00;45;41;25 - 00;45;43;05

Neal Davis

So, so one thing to just.

00;45;43;05 - 00;46;06;22

Ryan Shosted

Stress over and over again is that the desert alphabet was a 25 year long project, right? And so anything that lasts in an institution that long is going to change. And that's one of the difficulties, you know, as, as Neal has expressed in kind of coming up with a single purpose for the alphabet, a single reason that the alphabet exists.

00;46;06;22 - 00;46;31;17

Ryan Shosted

And so by talking about one topic, it might almost seem like we're giving short shrift to another, but we have to hold all of these possibilities together at the same time. And so they're not really competing explanations. I think it's I think I think we're in agreement that it's a false start to believe that talking about print culture versus talking about a damage versus talking about, you know, spelling reform for children, but these are all it had to be one of them now.

00;46;31;17 - 00;46;54;22

Ryan Shosted

It was actually all of them. Right. And so let's talk a little bit then about about print culture. Right. So the Second Great Awakening is this period of just efflorescence in the United States in terms of, of, of you could say kind of democratic, almost religion. Right. Mason Hatch calls it the democratization of American Christianity. And it comes along with the printing press as part and parcel.

00;46;54;23 - 00;47;21;27

Ryan Shosted

Right? So everybody is printing tracts and pamphlets and dictionaries for the New Testament. And printing technology is just releasing everybody's, everybody's inclinations about questioning and doubting and asking all kinds of new and interesting questions about Christianity, about the future, about how, you know, America relates to God's plans for, you know, for for his people, all of these kinds of things.

00;47;21;27 - 00;47;47;12

Ryan Shosted

And, of course, we see them all distilled in their own peculiar and very interesting way in, in, in, in Joseph Smith's thinking. And then later on in the thinking of leaders like Brigham Young. So they were super interested in printing, but it wasn't unique to them. They were interested in printing. And the first discussions about printing a schoolbook that would, if I remember the quote, it was Hebrew Kimball.

00;47;47;13 - 00;48;06;26

Ryan Shosted

They were still in Nevada. And he said something at General Conference about printing a school book that would not be after the gentile order. What does that mean? Did that mean they would it would include, you know, Mormon teachings or did it mean it would literally be printed? Not after the Gentile order. It would be printed in an a new and distinct alphabet.

00;48;06;26 - 00;48;28;18

Ryan Shosted

There's reason to believe they were already discussing that kind of stuff. They ordered Pitman phono type. Pitman phono type was brought to them on the plains to to be used by the printing press. Once they got to wherever it was that they were going. Sadly, the prototype was destroyed in, in in transit and so they weren't able to use it.

00;48;28;21 - 00;48;48;14

Ryan Shosted

And so they became interested early after the adoption of the alphabet. Once they had gone through all this deliberative effort, they needed to print in it. That's what they needed to do, right? That's what they needed to do, was they needed to they needed to publish it, which is one of the things that kind of drives against the grain of the secrecy claims.

00;48;48;20 - 00;49;12;08

Ryan Shosted

One of the very first things they do with the desert alphabet is publish the key to the desert alphabet. So, so much for keeping secrets, right? Although they're very fascinating reasons to talk about how they understood it to be secretive. Nonetheless, in any event, they're publishing and they so they needed to make type. So making type became an important aspect of this material project that they had.

00;49;12;09 - 00;49;35;09

Ryan Shosted

We discussed that in the book. Brigham Young was never satisfied with the type. He hated the look of the type. He was an esthetic and who could not be satisfied in certain respects. And one of them was with the desert alphabet. He just he never liked it. He didn't like the way it looked and could never quite put his finger on why he didn't like it, or command someone to make it in the way that he liked it.

00;49;35;11 - 00;49;59;12

Ryan Shosted

And this goes on throughout the 25 year period of the desert alphabets existence. And so they began publishing WWF as one of the first people, then to use the desert alphabet in what he called the Desert Almanac, was his own kind of private publication that he used the church press to produce, and he printed an early version of the key to the Deseret alphabet.

00;49;59;14 - 00;50;27;08

Ryan Shosted

And, you know, they then go to the trouble, a great deal of trouble and expense to have a movable type produced in Saint Louis at the time, to have it more professionally done by a professional type foundry. That type was used in the Deseret News. And what did they publish in the Deseret News? Did they publish editorials? Did they publish defenses of Mormonism?

00;50;27;08 - 00;50;55;20

Ryan Shosted

Did they publish, you know? Well, they started by publishing the sermon on the Mount. They published the sermon on the Mount various times. They published texts from largely from from the Hebrew Bible and from the New Testament. But they also published scriptures from the Book of Mormon and from the Doctrine and Covenants. And these were these were published in the Desert News along with the key.

00;50;55;22 - 00;51;31;13

Ryan Shosted

So it was almost like, I don't know, it kind of reminds me of, of, of something that might have been done in the church news 100 years later. It was very much scripturally based. They wanted to publish the scriptures in the Deseret alphabet. And so that was that was primarily what was published. And their plans to publish further culminated in the 1860s, late 1860s with the primers, the little school books that people are familiar with that are, you know, pedagogically oriented.

00;51;31;14 - 00;51;55;01

Ryan Shosted

They're not very theological at all. When you read them. There's nothing special in them about angels or the Hill Camera or Joseph Smith or temples or anything like that, which is rather surprising, because other schoolbooks of the same era could be very religious and could have very explicit doctrinal lessons in them. The readers have sayings of Jesus and things like that, but there's really nothing there.

00;51;55;01 - 00;52;23;02

Ryan Shosted

Only a few, a handful of instances. They call Deseret a fruit country at one point in the primer. So there they refer to Deseret explicitly and to Mormonism explicitly on only one occasion. Then in the late 1860s, they want to publish the Book of Mormon. And they do. And it's stupendous. It's an amazing, amazing achievement, particularly when you where guard how few spelling errors in the Deseret orthography there are in this document, or it's in Pratt.

00;52;23;05 - 00;52;44;17

Ryan Shosted

Read every page up to five times the proofs to make sure that it was as perfect as it could possibly be. It's really astounding that they did that. And that's what the plans were in the works. They had transcribed the entire Old Testament. They had transcribed the entire New Testament. They had hidden this. They had transcribed the Doctrine and Covenants, including the lectures on Faith.

00;52;44;18 - 00;53;09;22

Ryan Shosted

They had transcribed a large portion of something that was called the Catechism for children, which was, you might think of it as an early primary manual. These were all to be published in the desert alphabet. And what else might have been published in the Desert Alphabet later on? Who knows? They talk about publishing great works of literature, history, science, publishing everything that was good for people to learn.

00;53;09;23 - 00;53;31;28

Ryan Shosted

And of course, the idea was that this could somehow be exclusive of, of of a material that would be present. We published outside of the church. They never really got around to publishing anything that could be regarded as secular, but that's something that they were interested in doing. They could have published editorials in the Deseret News in the Desert Alphabet.

00;53;31;29 - 00;53;57;18

Ryan Shosted

They didn't. They published scriptures in the desert alphabet. So it leads me to believe that, you know, they really did want to use the desert alphabet for the purpose of making God's Word available and making it so, so accessible that people could read it easily. And frankly, that's one of the things that Isaac Pitman was very interested in as well.

00;53;57;20 - 00;53;59;00

Ryan Shosted

Okay. So that's that's it.

00;53;59;06 - 00;54;23;03

Neal Davis

I think it's, you know, obviously what the desert that was for evolved over this 25 year period is mentioned. And we enumerate a number of hypotheses that people put forward. We have a couple that to our knowledge, no one else is forward as well. And we we address the evidence that supports your stance against each of these principles.

00;54;23;03 - 00;54;54;28

Neal Davis

But that that last institutional laws and of the desert alphabet in 1868 and 1869, I think can best be understood by looking at what was sold to happen in 1869, which was the completion of the railroad. And before I got into this project, I had not realized how much of an identity crisis the coming of the railroad was for Utah.

00;54;55;00 - 00;55;32;02

Neal Davis

You know, it gets treated almost as just sort of this economic thing that happens. And now it's easier to go to Utah. But, you know, the Saints had been isolated for 22 years. Most of their interactions with, with the Gentiles had either been starkly negative things like the Utah War, the the quote unquote, occupation by federal forces. Prior to the prior to the Civil War, there had been a lot of tension ongoing with the people passing through, of course, most notably the Mountain Meadows massacre.

00;55;32;03 - 00;56;09;08

Neal Davis

But a number of other nor less dramatic incidents, encounters with gentile miners going over in 1849, the Saints had really carved out an identity for themselves that was psychologically very independent. You know, they occupied this liminal position in society. They liked that in many ways. There's a there's a folk song from Utah around the time that has the line, the Great Union Railroad will run the devil through.

00;56;09;08 - 00;56;42;19

Neal Davis

And, you know, they really did see the coming of the railroad as the end of their capability of of really having a fully independent identity, like they understood in some sense that they were going to lose parts of those. And of course, this is pretty warm and underground and the very lean years of the 1880s and so forth, and the compromise of the 1890s, you know, they don't know what any that's going to look like yet.

00;56;42;20 - 00;57;11;22

Neal Davis

But one of the the impulses they have at this time is this last hard push for the desert alphabet to publish some things they publish. I believe it's 500 copies of the Book of Mormon. Most of them are never sold. There's a there's an advertisement we really produced in the book, and the church leaders are hopeful that the Saints will take up this this marker.

00;57;11;27 - 00;57;47;22

Neal Davis

Distinctiveness and cultural homogeneity, cultural cohesion. And unfortunately, for various reasons, it doesn't happen in 1869, 1870. And that's really the end of the desert alphabet as a serious intellectual project. It drags on for a few more years as kind of a twilight. And then its primary advocates VI in 1875, 1877 era. And that's the end of the project as an institutional effort.

00;57;47;25 - 00;58;12;13

Nicholas Shrum

So, I mean, those are good reasons. The people that were the primary advocates for the desert alphabet begin to pass away, especially in the mid 1870s. By the 18 by 1880, most of that first guard of pioneers or people that had interacted with Joseph Smith during the Kirtland and Nauvoo periods are gone. Are there any other I mean, you mentioned the coming of the railroad in 1869.

00;58;12;13 - 00;58;46;05

Nicholas Shrum

Are there other things that lead to the desert alphabets? Conclusion as a as a 19th century project that you guys can pinpoint to because there are a lot of other distinctive Mormon things that continue that people are, are attached to, namely polygamy right through through the 1880s and 1890s and into the 19 tens. What's kind of the difference between why this starts to trail off versus some other things that were distinctive and important to the Mormon community during that time?

00;58;46;12 - 00;59;12;11

Ryan Shosted

Well, the big one is that the desert alphabet was never as popular as polygamy was. So, you know, we talk about the desert alphabet, and it's reified by people like like Burton, who, you know, he writes about seeing signs written in the desert alphabet, and you know that it's publicly familiar to everybody. This is this is imaginary. It really wasn't publicly familiar to everybody.

00;59;12;11 - 00;59;33;11

Ryan Shosted

People saw it on the first or second or eighth page of the Deseret News and maybe looked at it almost like it was the crossword puzzle. There were some people who were very committed to it. There were teachers who believed in that very strongly. But the fact of the matter is it the people didn't partake, the people didn't partake.

00;59;33;12 - 01;00;00;02

Ryan Shosted

And so it it it increasingly, as time went by, it wasn't really they were looking for problems that the desert alphabet could solve. Right in the beginning, even the kind of more pragmatic individuals involved in the alphabet, like, you know, Parley Pratt or Orson Spencer, right? They could get behind it because they thought, well, you know, maybe we'll save some money.

01;00;00;02 - 01;00;24;19

Ryan Shosted

We won't waste as much money on ink and paper, etc., etc. but, you know, as the cost of printing came down, it really wasn't it wasn't necessary. It didn't have an economic purpose anymore. It was probably George Q cannon who finally convinced Brigham Young that this is, you know, not necessarily this isn't something we should keep investing in.

01;00;24;20 - 01;00;40;28

Ryan Shosted

It's very it's really fascinating that Orson Pratt was on his way to England to publish the Doctrine and Covenants. Is that right? Neal. The doctrine covenants of the Book of Mormon in Pitman phono type.

01;00;41;01 - 01;00;43;13

Neal Davis

I don't remember which book it was, but yes.

01;00;43;16 - 01;01;05;14

Ryan Shosted

But he was going to publish Mormon scripture in the Pitman bono type. So they were giving up on the desert alphabet in favor of Pitman's going to type wholesale. Brigham Young died in the middle of that adventure. And they recalled, they recalled, Orson Pratt and John Taylor never picked it up again. So no one was ever interested in phonetic reform.

01;01;05;14 - 01;01;36;29

Ryan Shosted

But but Brigham Young himself, the the the advocate of the desert alphabet as this unique Mormon system of writing, he gave up on it. We think that it's partly because George Albert Smith of the apostles, or George Smith, as he's referred to in historiography, George H. Smith was the really he was the lieutenant who was talking about the Deseret alphabet in in General Conference.

01;01;36;29 - 01;01;57;29

Ryan Shosted

He seemed to be a true believer in the desert alphabet for, you know, there are many possible reasons why that might be. But his death was certainly important. And so I guess we can make it a little bit more specific. In answer to your question, there were the deaths of certain individuals. A lot of people attribute it to the death of Brigham Young, but that's just a shorthand for it.

01;01;58;00 - 01;02;24;00

Ryan Shosted

In fact, Brigham Young had already had already kind of given up. And we've read by looking at the primary source documents, it's pretty clear that it was George Q cannon who was in Brigham Young's ear after George Smith died, saying, you know, let's let's drop it like this isn't this isn't profitable. It's not fulfilling the purposes that, you know, whatever those purposes were that were originally set out.

01;02;24;02 - 01;02;49;03

Ryan Shosted

Right. George Q cannon is one of the new guard, right? He wasn't an apostle in the 1850s, early 1850s discussing this with the University of Desert Region. So even though there are indications in the juvenile instructor of George Cannon arguing in favor of the desert alphabet, he was more than likely doing it kind of half heartedly. I don't think they realized what they were giving up on.

01;02;49;09 - 01;03;12;04

Ryan Shosted

What they were giving up on was a source of Mormon identity, of symbolic symbolic identity. And that's what, you know, to preview what we might talk about a little bit later is one of the reasons that we see it coming back is because of its strong relationship, imagined or real, to what it means to be a mormon.

01;03;12;06 - 01;03;45;24

Neal Davis

Well, I will point out as well that the the strongest hypothetical case that I think could be made for the Jesuit alphabet as being intended as a vehicle of secrecy would have been if it had been readopted during the Mormon underground years under John Taylor and starting in 1883. And it is not so either. It had fallen so far out of their own awareness that they weren't paying attention to it, or that wasn't really something that they had thought of as a potential use for it.

01;03;45;26 - 01;04;16;20

Nicholas Shrum

Well, thank you both for for addressing kind of that that broad timeline and situating the desert alphabet within this broader Mormon print culture in the 19th century. There are a lot of really interesting things that in this book that you address. I mean, you talk about as many things as how which we've discussed how the Deseret alphabet was meant to or can be kind of a key to understanding how people spoke, the accents, the inflection that people had during that time.

01;04;16;20 - 01;04;47;22

Nicholas Shrum

That's discussed quite a bit. Neal discussed this just just recently about kind of the secrecy. And there are a lot of accusations against the the more Mormon desert alphabet that it's the secret code that the Gentiles aren't supposed to know what it is. And there's kind of these humorous anecdotes about voting and how on the People's Party voting ticket, there's just kind of random Deseret Alphabet things that are on there that don't really point to telling Mormons how to vote, but the outsiders kind of see it that way.

01;04;47;22 - 01;05;13;00

Nicholas Shrum

And so there's a lot of interesting discussion about that and how it was also used to help teach people English and working with indigenous relations during the 19th century. But I wanted to move into things that maybe people have encountered with the desert alphabet in this more contemporary period. And in the final chapter, you talk about this modern digital revival of the desert alphabet.

01;05;13;03 - 01;05;34;28

Nicholas Shrum

I wonder if we can talk about how it's been. You use the word icon. I's iconic. It's how it's been becomes an icon, right today with artists and then sometimes kind of controversial online movements, movements like that. If we can talk about where it's gone in the last 40 years, where white people see it and what does it mean?

01;05;35;01 - 01;06;02;03

Neal Davis

The desert alphabet, of course, is written by hand and it's set in type. When people start representing things on a computer, of course you have to have some way of writing it on a computer, you have to have a font, and a font is essentially a collection of images that are associated with code points, which are just numbers.

01;06;02;06 - 01;06;52;11

Neal Davis

And so there's a standard set of numbers that's often called Ascii, that refers to your basic regular Roman alphabet and punctuation. People experimented early on, starting in probably the late 80s, with writing Deseret using a regular font. And so like the Q character, which doesn't occur. It would map to some other symbol, probably the. The happiest accident that happened for Deseret was when Unicode, which is a consortium which basically manages the assignment of of numbers to characters across all the alphabets of the world.

01;06;52;14 - 01;07;30;04

Neal Davis

Unicode needed to experiment with an extended additional collection of characters, that they were uncertain whether or not these would ever be actually used by any existing software. This is in the late 90s, when this conversation is taking place, and John Jenkins, who works at Jenkins and Apple, Xerox. I forget which one he works for. And Ken George was at Apple and Ken Beasley.

01;07;30;06 - 01;08;03;10

Neal Davis

Put together a proposal to basically use the desert alphabet as the trial balloon for this extended set of character support. This was politically palatable in that it didn't mean that an existing language user community like Cherokee alphabet users would be locked out of using something if it wasn't adopted. And one of the things that they cite in its support is that there are no users of the desert alphabet essentially, at the time that they're writing.

01;08;03;12 - 01;08;36;18

Neal Davis

And so the desert alphabet is added to Unicode in 2000 and 2001. And at that point, it becomes straightforward to produce a font that anyone who has the fonts will be able to represent the desert alphabet on their screen, and this starts to fuel a lot of interest in producing digital artifacts that use the Deseret. There are people around the same time, like Ed Bateman, who is producing pop art in the artistic tradition with the Deseret.

01;08;36;24 - 01;09;04;08

Neal Davis

There's Bob Moss, who is doing the sensory, what you might call weird Utah folk art, wood burnings and the like using the desert alphabet. And this artistic scene starts to shift more online around this time, like like everything does. But it's really enabled by the fact that you can now write Deseret unambiguously on a computer, and someone else can read it without guessing which font they might have to download to make this possible.

01;09;04;11 - 01;09;33;05

Neal Davis

This starts to fuel probably around the early 20 tens. Various Twitter users and so forth start to use this. We discuss desert, which is probably the first major online movements to utilize the desert alphabet in the sort of consistent way, outside of artists who are using it in a more disorganized and personal manner. We cut off the book around 2020.

01;09;33;12 - 01;09;55;14

Neal Davis

Since that time, there's also become a more significant Tumblr artist community that started to adopt it as well. And of course, we imagine that it will continue to be used in ways that are completely unforeseen by us and by communities that are that are I can I think in different ways. So, so to talk a little bit about that term.

01;09;55;17 - 01;10;31;19

Neal Davis

For the communities that are using the Deseret, the words that are being written in the Deseret are often less important than the fact that it is being written in the Deseret. It doesn't particularly matter to them if things are quote unquote spelled correctly. It doesn't matter to them if anyone else can read the thing that they're writing, it simply matters that they are using the Deseret and that that Deseret marks the people using it to each other as certain kinds of insiders, that they're they're on the same side of a joke or a reference to each other.

01;10;31;21 - 01;11;05;13

Neal Davis

This is one reason that outside of John Jenkins Desert alphabet classics work, most of the products of the desert alphabet in the modern era have not been long texts, they've been short epigrams and the like, or even single words. In some cases, single characters like the character gay as found some currency on Tumblr more recently. And so people are starting to adopt and use the desert alphabet in ways that were certainly unforeseen by the Mormon brethren in the 1850s.

01;11;05;15 - 01;11;43;01

Neal Davis

It's being used by communities that in many cases, do not identify completely or even partially as Mormon or LDS. In some sense, it does tend to be associated with Utah or like there's kind of a Venn diagram, and as long as one of these things intersects with weird art, or Utah or Mormon or and so forth, or X Mormon or whatever, people feel like they can use the desert alphabet in new ways, intersecting with that identity, but it has become a sort of multifarious cultural identity marker.

01;11;43;03 - 01;12;00;28

Neal Davis

And I think that is something that was was in some sense envisioned that that would become a marker, but has not become a marker for the people for whom it was originally intended, and has certainly been used in ways that have have grown far beyond that initial remnant.

01;12;01;00 - 01;12;20;19

Ryan Shosted

So I was at a Neal and I were both at Mormon History Association in Las Vegas earlier this year, and we went to a panel from temporary Artists, and all five of these contemporary artists who were on the panel had used the desert alphabet in one way or another. And so I asked them, why are you doing this?

01;12;20;20 - 01;12;49;15

Ryan Shosted

Why are you using the desert alphabet? What's what's the point of this? And got some great answers. I'm looking at my notes here right now. They said mystery being a part of an in-group with a secret code, they referred to their sense of cultural loss as, as as faithful Mormons. The feeling that they're there, their culture itself is perhaps not being preserved.

01;12;49;18 - 01;13;25;26

Ryan Shosted

Pride in being a peculiar people, they said. Reaction to that, to a loss of that peculiarity. They referred to the idea of reclamation, an embodied sense of Mormon lore. One of them said something like, secret language is a part of Mormonism. It just is pushback against assimilation. They referred multiple times to this idea of in-group versus outgroup. The shape of the letters themselves seems to be of of importance, which I think Brigham Young would be happy to hear.

01;13;26;01 - 01;13;55;20

Ryan Shosted

He thought that the shapes of letters were important to, and I think the comment that was made that was most striking to me by one of the panelists was that so many of our signifiers as Mormons are inward. He mentioned the garment being something that no one sees you wear, whereas the desert alphabet, as Neal pointed out, is something that you can use and you can use it online and it can point to some aspect of your identity.

01;13;55;27 - 01;14;19;24

Ryan Shosted

Now, the fascinating thing, and Neal points this out beautifully. What he's just said is that it doesn't mean just one thing. Sure, the Deseret nationalists, the does not. They used it for one particular ideological purpose, but it's a writing system. It's bigger than that. It's more neutral than that. It can be used for anything. And the church doesn't own it, right?

01;14;19;25 - 01;14;42;18

Ryan Shosted

It's quintessentially Mormon. But like so much other language and imagery that's owned and copyrighted by the church, that desert alphabet is free, right? It's just out there. You can use it. And by the way, the church doesn't really sanction it or not sanction it. It scratches a wonderful itch because it's not part of the polemic of Mormon history.

01;14;42;18 - 01;15;13;25

Ryan Shosted

It's, you know, people have tried to cast it as, you know, failure of Brigham Young or, you know, evidence that he wasn't really a prophet because he didn't know how dumb the desert alphabet was or something like that. But in fact, the desert alphabet has survived. It's still being used, and not necessarily in some kind of Mormon triumphalism sense, but simply because it speaks to the history of a people who are deeply interested in their history both as Westerners, Utahns, and as Mormons, Gentile and Mormon alike.

01;15;13;27 - 01;15;35;04

Ryan Shosted

And the Deseret alphabet can be used for those purposes. So we're pretty sanguine about the future of the Deseret alphabet. That's one of the reasons that we're doing all the work that we're doing online to build this corpus of 19th century spelling, so that people who do want to interact with the alphabet in a kind of more authentic 19th century way that they have access to that materials.

01;15;35;09 - 01;16;02;16

Ryan Shosted

But like nil says, we're not here to tell people how they're supposed to use it as an alphabet. I mean, it's been chaos since the beginning, and it's going to continue to be chaos more than likely, because at the end of the day, it's a phonetic alphabet. So people will use it the way they think they sound, or they'll just use it to express that iconicity, that identity that relates them to, you know, all the various different identities that might be associated with the Mormon past.

01;16;02;19 - 01;16;24;17

Nicholas Shrum

Well, thank you both. And Ryan, especially just what you mentioned with the, you know, you you you both have written this book and done a ton of research, but this is an ongoing project as well, with a really excellent website that is put on through the University of Illinois about the desert alphabet that will ensure is included in the social media posts and the show notes for for this Scholars and Saints episode.

01;16;24;17 - 01;16;46;23

Nicholas Shrum

Because, you know, we hope the people read the book, but this is also a great resource to introduce people and see. I mean, I just love that there's a learn how to read the desert alphabet. There's various transcriptions and lexicons that people can, can, can look into themselves and hopefully spark more interest in in the alphabet and the book that you both have written.

01;16;46;27 - 01;17;12;19

Nicholas Shrum

So one question that I always close with at the end of these podcasts is if you can reflect briefly on why people that aren't necessarily interested in Mormon studies or linguistics or religion, why should they read this book? It's kind of a broad question, but kind of what's your, your, your your sense of why why this this is important for a very broad audience.

01;17;12;21 - 01;17;15;08

Nicholas Shrum

Maybe we could start with, with urine and then we can have Neal.

01;17;15;10 - 01;17;38;19

Ryan Shosted

Sure. So I mean, I think that the, the audiences you already mentioned are pretty obvious ones, right? We think that Mormon studies folks are should naturally be interested in it. We hope that what we've produced is a durable document that people will be able to refer to. As you very kindly said, whenever the Deseret alphabet comes up, because, Greg, there hasn't been a monograph about it before.

01;17;38;21 - 01;18;05;14

Ryan Shosted

And as far as kind of extending that circle out from Mormon studies, as far as linguists is concerned, we think that they would be very interested in it because it's a it's actually kind of it's a it's a it's a phonetic alphabet on the loose in the 1850s in Utah. And people are just using it. That in itself creates really interesting questions about transcription, about people thinking about the voice in their own head.

01;18;05;15 - 01;18;33;18

Ryan Shosted

Are they writing like themselves or are they writing like somebody else? There's just a lot more to be said about that, and a lot more to do. And that's one of the reasons that we're compiling all of the documents that we're compiling, is so that there's plenty of evidence for people to make all kinds of interesting claims and hopefully, discoveries that relate to what happens when you bring people from all around the English speaking world and you put them in the Great Basin, and they create their own language, right?

01;18;33;21 - 01;18;52;25

Ryan Shosted

In a sense, they create their own dialect. It's been said in the past that somehow the Deseret alphabet was responsible for the, you know, some funny things that people might say in Utah that doesn't really hold any water, that doesn't make a lot of sense from a linguistic point of view. But what is interesting is that they might have written down the funny way they spoke.

01;18;52;25 - 01;19;23;22

Ryan Shosted

And in fact, you get really interesting things like that. You get things like, you know, Wilford Woodruff saying, marching instead of morning writing, marching instead of morning. You get a Deseret News editor or typesetter saying Auty instead of Hotty Dry dropping the at H, just like you might see in in My Fair Lady. So we hope that that will capture people's imagination about what is possible when something like a phonetic alphabet is just kind of put into people's hands to use however they would like.

01;19;23;25 - 01;19;52;15

Ryan Shosted

It says so much about, you know, the religious history of the 19th century as well, the idea that it kind of encapsulates this, this, this interesting tension in 19th century Mormonism between the populism or democratization, if you will, of of religion. That's part of the great awake, the Second Great Awakening. But then that kind of almost authoritarian turnaround that winds up happening that doesn't, you know, it's not Brigham Young's fault.

01;19;52;15 - 01;20;12;18

Ryan Shosted

It starts with Joseph Smith. Right? The idea that, no, there's there's somebody at the top of this, of this chain, and that's the person you're supposed to listen to. So you have this wonderfully potentially democratizing thing, which is letting everybody helping everybody learn how to read. But it's being imposed by the from the top down. Right. Here's this alphabet.

01;20;12;20 - 01;20;37;25

Ryan Shosted

Everybody better just do it. Everybody better accept it and use it and it'll be good for you. And guess what? Nobody. Nobody. Very few people used it. Right. So it didn't it didn't work out the way that they thought. And so in that sense, it encapsulates some really interesting I think that they're scholars of the religious history of the United States in the 19th century, who might be really interested in this as a test case.

01;20;37;25 - 01;21;12;19

Ryan Shosted

And again, something that that exemplifies, you know, what early Mormonism was really capable of, how how eclectic it was and how interested it was in societal reform, educational reform. So we hope that it's a book that will be interesting to people who regard the Mormon past as part of their past, part of their identity. We think that those kind of people are probably those who are most excited about the book, and and we're excited about their excitement.

01;21;12;19 - 01;21;30;17

Ryan Shosted

We've already been receiving emails from people who found things in, you know, documents that are written in the desert alphabet that we've never seen before and have sent them to us and have asked us to to to take a look at them and try to figure out where you know, what error they're from and what exactly is said in this document.

01;21;30;18 - 01;21;36;01

Ryan Shosted

We expect that that will happen more. And we're we're excited about that possibility.

01;21;36;04 - 01;22;08;00

Neal Davis

So the book itself is structured with three history chapters at the beginning, and then a number of topical chapters that are exploring reasons why the alphabet was used in certain ways. So there's a social purposes of practical purposes, a spiritual purpose chapter and so forth. And then there's a, you know, Paul Harvey style. The rest of the story concluding history chapter that kind of launched you through the afterlife and the modern revival.

01;22;08;02 - 01;22;35;18

Neal Davis

The purposes chapters in particular, were written to be more or less self-contained, which means that if someone comes in and they're more interested in just taking a look at the theological ramifications of the desert alphabet, there's a chapter they could pick up that lets them explore, you know, what the primary 19th century evidence is and our interpretation of that evidence.

01;22;35;18 - 01;22;53;20

Neal Davis

But we try to let the primary sources speak as much as possible in that regard, and have gone to great lengths to try and gather, at minimum, references to all of the primary sources that matter to this question.

01;22;53;22 - 01;23;07;19

Neal Davis

You know, there are there are people who are interested in questions of language. There are, I mean, like, let's face it, the IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet is Super Bowl, and it doesn't have the the.

01;23;07;22 - 01;23;34;28

Neal Davis

Tangled history that the desert alphabet has and acting like it's the end of the story on phonetics when, while certainly useful, I think closes the door too soon on the question of what people might perceive or try to do with the tools that they have for recording and thinking about language phonetically, I know that there are people in I know, I know the least three efforts in recent years.

01;23;35;00 - 01;24;09;11

Neal Davis

They've all been so offers, but people who have taken the desert alphabet and tried to adapt it in some way to make it more both phonetically and artistically relevant, you know, they're still grappling with the same question via the intermediary of the desert alphabet of how would this do a better job for English than it currently does. People have using it with other languages, both during the primary period of its use in the 1800s, but also more recently, we've seen people on Tumblr and Twitter start to translate texts.

01;24;09;13 - 01;24;31;25

Neal Davis

You know, again, short, short sayings into Spanish and other languages. So there there are people who are interested in language both casually and professionally. There are people who are just interested in a historical story. And, you know, there's a sense in which, you know, as an author and a scholar in this field, I want to say, well, the Jesuit alphabet is is special.

01;24;32;01 - 01;24;58;11

Neal Davis

But one of the very interesting things about Mormon history in the 19th century is that there's a there's a sense in which desert alphabet isn't special, right? The fact that we can take something like the desert alphabet and go down this deep of a rabbit hole, you know, analogous things can be done with so many other things that happened in the in the Utah frontier period or afterwards.

01;24;58;13 - 01;25;42;23

Neal Davis

And this is this is one particular slice of that history. And, you know, it touches essentially every aspect, from domestic concerns to Native American relationships to, you know, immigration and foreign missions and the the printing and translation efforts. It touches the monetary policy that at one point it touches folklore there. You know, in the appendix, if you go hunting, there's a there's kind of an Easter egg from a document where a certain prominent individual is talking about having seen a nine foot tall skeleton in a cave in upstate New York when they were a youth.

01;25;42;26 - 01;26;05;09

Neal Davis

And that's that's hardly the only interesting thing buried in these texts that that you can go find. So at the end of the day, you know, if you're just interested in a good story that you've probably never heard before, but probably touches a lot of things that you have seen before, the desert alphabet is is a way of those parts of that history.

01;26;05;11 - 01;26;37;23

Ryan Shosted

It's like the connective tissue for so many things, just like Neal said. Mountain Meadows massacre, the Amerindian apocalypse, educational reform, the ideas of, you know, an language, the language of the language of the new millennium, hieroglyphics. What's what was really written on the golden plates. You know, it's just it's fabulous. And it really connects to all those things.

01;26;37;23 - 01;26;44;13

Ryan Shosted

So in some ways it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a tour of 19th century Mormonism for sure.

01;26;44;15 - 01;26;56;23

Nicholas Shrum

Well thank you both so much. Just one quick question. I hope that that listeners will also be interested to know what what what other projects you both are working on. Are there any things on the horizon that we should be on the lookout for?

01;26;56;26 - 01;27;30;25

Neal Davis

Says the Illinois Desert Consortium has continued to employ several students to continue transcriptions and write, and I have also been working on transcriptions. Our ambition there is to make everything that was published in the 19th century in the Desert alphabet, available in computer searchable form, and fantastic progress has been made on that front. We we have been publishing these at the Illinois Desert Consortium site, which is hosted at the University of Illinois.

01;27;30;28 - 01;28;00;13

Neal Davis

And then Ryan and I have been chasing down some ideas that were raised by the desert alphabet book production process and either ended up out of scope, or were dangling threads that have thrown into unraveling whole sweaters in history. And so we're looking at the Mormon philosophy of language across a lot, a lot of areas more broadly than the Deseret alphabet as a production.

01;28;00;16 - 01;28;29;28

Ryan Shosted

And I want to shout out to Neal that he has been able to produce the first text, searchable transcription of the Deseret Alphabet book of Mormon. People have tried to do it over and over again over the years, but he did it, and we have it on the consortium website. You can, you know, you could look at scans as I did of the desert alphabet Book of Mormon, you know, 5 or 6 years ago, whenever the Library of Congress decided to put them on their website.

01;28;29;28 - 01;29;10;01

Ryan Shosted

But having a scanned image of the page is not the same as being able to do a text search. Because of the text search, you can say things. You can ask questions like how is this particular word spelled? And that resource is available and you know it. It's it's fantastic. Neal could explain better exactly how it worked, but I wanted to make sure that he is recognized for that, because the ability to take those pages and do some kind of optical character recognition is not as easy as it might seem at first, not in small part because there's not a lot of text printed in in the desert alphabet to train a model on.

01;29;10;01 - 01;29;21;24

Ryan Shosted

And so, with some very ingenious thinking, he was able to train it and transliterate the Book of Mormon. And you can go there and read it on the website.

01;29;22;00 - 01;29;41;23

Nicholas Shrum

Excellent. Well, thank you both so much. Again, this has been Ryan Shosted and Neal Davis, who are the authors of the Deseret Alphabet, a fixed and Unalterable sound, published with the University of Illinois Press in summer 2026. I hope that people will get a copy of it and see what it has to offer. And thank you both so much for being on the podcast.

01;29;41;24 - 01;29;45;03

Neal Davis

You pleasure.

01;29;45;05 - 01;30;01;22

Nicholas Shrum

I hope you enjoyed this episode of Scholars and Saints. Please be sure to come back to hear more conversations soon. A special thank you to Harrison Stewart for production, editing, and to Ben Allington for providing music for this episode. To hear more, visit Mormon Guitar. Thank you for listening.