Deseret Alphabet

The Deseret alphabet (; Deseret: or ) is a phonemic English-language spelling reform developed between 1847 and 1854 by the board of regents of the University of Deseret under the leadership of Brigham Young, the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). George D. Watt is reported to have been the most actively involved in the development of the script, as well as being its first serious user.

In public statements, Young claimed the alphabet was intended to replace the traditional Latin alphabet with an alternative, more phonetically accurate alphabet for the English language. This would offer immigrants an opportunity to learn to read and write English, he said, the orthography of which is often less phonetically consistent than those of many other languages. Similar neographies have not been uncommon, the most well-known of which for English is the Shavian alphabet.

The Deseret alphabet was an outgrowth of Young's, and the early LDS Church's, idealism and utopianism. Young and the Mormon pioneers believed "all aspects of life" were in need of reform, and the Deseret alphabet was just one of many ways they sought to bring about a complete " transformation in society".

Young also prescribed the learning of Deseret to the school system, stating "It will be the means of introducing uniformity in our orthography, and the years that are now required to learn to read and spell can be devoted to other studies."

During the alphabet's heyday between 1854 and 1869, books, newspapers, street signs and correspondence used the new letters, but despite heavy and costly promotion by the early LDS Church, the alphabet never enjoyed prolonged widespread use and has been regarded by historians as a failure.

History

Creation (1847–1854)

The Deseret alphabet was a project of the Mormon pioneers, a group of early followers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) which set about building a new society in the Utah desert after the death of the church's founder, Joseph Smith. The Deseret alphabet was just one of many ways that the Mormon pioneers tried to bring about a complete " transformation in society", as an outgrowth of their idealism and utopianism.

The Deseret alphabet was developed primarily by a committee made up of the board of regents of the University of Deseret, members of which included church leaders Brigham Young, Parley P. Pratt and Heber C. Kimball. According to Brigham Young University professor Richard G. Moore, most scholars believe that George D. Watt's contribution to the actual form the alphabet took was the greatest; he furthermore "plant dthe idea of spelling reform in Brigham Young's mind" through a phonography class he gave after the death of Joseph Smith which Young attended. William W. Phelps helped "work out the letters" along with Pratt. Before they decided on the Deseret alphabet, the attention of the board of regents was mostly focused on Pitman style alphabets, and in April 1847 Brigham Young nearly purchased of lead type to print books using Pitman's orthography. The University of Deseret was incorporated on 28 February 1850; less than three weeks later, on 20 March, the new board of regents began to discuss spelling reform.

On 29 November 1853, the committee was ready to approve a slightly modified version of the Pitman orthography, when Willard Richards, who had been deathly ill and missed the debate before the vote, saw the proposed alphabet, which spelled the word "phonetic" as "fɷnetic". Richards was quick to condemn it, saying to the committee that in his view "those characters...seem like putting old wine into new bottles...I am inclined to think...we shall...throw away all characters that bear much resemblance to the English characters, and introduce an alphabet that is original."

These words persuaded Brigham Young and the rest of the committee, and Watt then endeavored to create an original alphabet. Less than two months later, on 19 January 1854, the board of regents finally approved the first 38-letter Deseret alphabet. One legacy of Pitman's orthography survived, though: the idea that one letter should equal one sound.

Use by the Mormon pioneers (1854–1869)

Upon the alphabet's acceptance, its first user was its principal architect, George D. Watt, who began writing the meeting minutes of the early Bishops in a cursive form of it in 1854. Almost immediately after its publication, church members began experimenting with it, and by 1855 travel writers Jules Remy and Julius Brenchley published a chart of the new alphabet which differed heavily from the 1854 version. Some early Mormons, such as Thales Hastings Haskell, began writing their personal journals in the new alphabet. Remy further reported that during his time in Salt Lake City, he saw signs on the street and above shops using the new alphabet.

After its approval by the board of regents, Brigham Young testified before the Utah territorial legislature that the new alphabet should "be thoroughly and extensively taught in all the schools." Some teaching in Utah schools did take place: John B. Milner taught the alphabet in Provo, Lehi, American Fork, and Pleasant Grove, while evening classes were taught in Salt Lake City and Farmington.

After several months' practice writing with the new alphabet, Watt wrote to Brigham Young that he was unhappy with it, and proposed a complete overhaul, which was never followed up on.

Word of the new alphabet soon spread outside Utah, and most press reports in non-Mormon papers were critical. Other writers, however, acquainted with other phonotypic and stenographic alphabets, ranged from neutral descriptions of the new alphabet to praise.

Until this point, all the printed material (mostly just charts of the alphabet and its standard orthography equivalents) had been produced with large wooden type, which was not suitable for printing at small sizes. Because the alphabet was wholly unique, no font existed, so in 1857 the board of regents appointed Erastus Snow to procure metal type from St. Louis-based font foundry Ladew & Peer. However, in May 1857 the Utah War began, and Snow left St. Louis to support the Mormon pioneers. During the war, Ladew & Peer kept working on the type, and the punches and matrices were delivered in the winter of 1858. The first use of the new type was to make a business card for George A. Smith, an early Mormon historian.

In 1859, with the new type in hand, the ''Deseret News'' began printing with it. It would print one piece per issue in the new alphabet, usually a quotation from '' The Book of Mormon'' or the New Testament. However, this only lasted for one year, after which the practice stopped; it would start again in May 1864 and stop permanently at the end of that year. Benn Pitman, the brother of Isaac Pitman, was also interested in spelling reform, and by 1864 had published his own orthography, which the board of regents considered adopting. However, they ultimately decided not to and used the opportunity to re-affirm their commitment to the Deseret alphabet.

Brigham Young blamed the failure of this first attempt at reform on the ugliness of the type developed by Ladew & Peer, and so he commissioned Russell's American Steam Printing House, a New York City based font foundry, to design more pleasing type. The result was the Bodoni-esque font (at right) that was used to print all of the books in this period. In an 1868 article, the ''Deseret News'' wrote that "the characters, to a person unaccustomed to them, may look strange, utto the eye to which they are familiar they are beautiful."

At least four books were published in the new alphabet, all transcribed by Orson Pratt and all using the Russell's House font: ''The First Deseret Alphabet Reader'' (1868), ''The Second Deseret Alphabet Reader'' (1868), ''The Book of Mormon'' (1869), and a ''Book of Mormon'' excerpt called '' First Nephi– Omni'' (1869).

Considerable non-printed material in the Deseret alphabet was made, including a replica headstone in Cedar City, Utah, some coinage, letters, diaries, and meeting minutes. One of the more curious items found in the Deseret alphabet is an English- Hopi dictionary prepared by two Mormon missionaries. It sat unappreciated in handwritten form at the LDS Church Archives until 2014, when Kenneth R. Beesley, a writing system researcher and computer scientist, noticed its significance and transcribed it into standard written English.

Decline (1869–1877)

Despite years of heavy promotion, the Deseret alphabet was never widely adopted. This reluctance was partly due to prohibitive costs; the project had already cost the early church $20,000, with $6,000 going to Pratt as remuneration for his transcription effort and most of the rest going to cutting metal type featuring the new alphabet and printing costs. In 1859, Orson Pratt estimated that the cost of supplying all Utah Territory schoolchildren with suitable textbooks would be over $5,000,000.

According to Beesley, many have written that interest in the Deseret alphabet died with Brigham Young. This, however, is not true; the alphabet was already regarded as a failure during Young's time. Only 500 copies of the full ''Book of Mormon'' translated into the Deseret alphabet sold for $2 each, and even Young realized that the venture was too expensive and even the most devout Mormons could not be convinced to purchase and study the Deseret edition books over the books in the traditional orthography. In the winter of 1870, just one year after their publication, advertisements for the Deseret alphabet books were quietly removed from the ''Deseret News''.

Contemporary writers noted that thousands of copies of the 15¢ and 20¢ Deseret primers went unsold, and historian Roby Wentz speculated that the LDS Church at that time had a "cache" of the primers in mint condition, which it was slowly selling off; according to him, one such primer sold for $250 in 1978.

The Mormons had planned to use the profits from sale of the earlier books to fund printing of more books, and in anticipation Orson Pratt had already transcribed the complete Bible, '' Doctrine and Covenants'', and John Jaques's ''Catechism for Children''. Pratt had also prepared an apparent sequel to the primers, the ''Deseret Phonetic Speller''. After the sales failure, however, none of these books were ever published and were thought lost until being rediscovered in a storage area of the LDS Church Archives in Salt Lake City in May 1967.

Ralph Vigoda, a reporter for ''The Philadelphia Inquirer'', has speculated that the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad may have contributed to the alphabet's downfall: non-Mormons, not loyal to Brigham Young, became a large part of the city, and without the religious motivation it would be difficult indeed to get them to learn a new alphabet. In a retrospective piece, historian A. J. Simmonds claims that the new railroad doomed the alphabet. According to him, easy access to "the whole literature of the English speaking world" rendered the alphabet useless.

In July 1877, Young tried one more time at a spelling reform, ordering lead type designed for the orthography of Benn Pitman (Isaac's brother) with the intention of printing an edition of the ''Book of Mormon'' and ''Doctrine and Covenants'' using it. Most of the type had arrived by August, but with Young's death, the translation was never undertaken and the type never used. Young's death thus marked the end of the Mormon experimentation with English spelling reforms.

Rediscovery in the computer era

Modern digital typography has reduced the costs of typesetting substantially, especially for small print runs. As long as a freely licensed Deseret alphabet font and a font of the standard orthography have similar inked surface areas, printing a book in the Deseret alphabet using modern technology would have a similar cost as printing a book in the standard orthography.

Film director Trent Harris used the Deseret alphabet in his 1994 satire of Mormon theology, ''Plan 10 from Outer Space'', where it features as an alien language used on a mysterious "Plaque of Kolob".

During the 1996 Utah Centennial celebration, an activity book for children was distributed, within which one of the activities was for a child to write their own name in the alphabet. The book says that a child who does this will be "the first kid in 100 years to write heirname in the Deseret alphabet!"

Also in 1996, ''Buffalo River Press'' published a reprint of the ''Deseret First Book'', of which only 10,000 were originally printed. The entire ''Book of Mormon'' in the Deseret alphabet has been likewise reprinted, as only 500 copies from the original print run exist, and they can sell on eBay for ≈$7,500 (as of 2004). In 1997, John Jenkins uploaded a free three part PDF of the so-called "triple combination", that is, a combined ''Book of Mormon'', ''Doctrine and Covenants'' and '' Pearl of Great Price''.

John Jenkins has gone on to publish many classic pieces of English literature in the Deseret alphabet, such as '' Alice in Wonderland,'' '' Pride and Prejudice'', and '' The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.''

Owing to the character set's inclusion in Unicode, most of the original books and many of the original manuscripts have been transcribed into plain text, and, when this is not possible due to discrepancies between the Unicode reference glyphs and the documents, LaTeX.

Fonts

The first digital font for the Deseret alphabet, called "Deseret", was designed by Greg Kearney as part of work he was doing for the LDS Church History Department in 1991; the font was used in an exhibit that year. In August 1995, a cleaned up, digitized version of the font in use in the ''Deseret Second Book'' was created by Salt Lake City graphic designer Edward Bateman, who made the font in Fontographer while working on ''Plan 10 from Outer Space''.

Kenneth R. Beesley created a Metafont (and thus, LaTeX-compatible) font called in 2002.

All computers running Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system or newer can display the entire Deseret alphabet Unicode range as the glyphs are included in the Segoe UI Symbol font.

Besides maintaining a Deseret input method for Windows, Joshua Erickson, a UCLA alumnus, also maintains a large collection of freeware Unicode fonts for the alphabet, which he collectively terms the "Bee Fonts."

There also exist free software fonts for the Deseret alphabet. Google, through its Noto Sans project, the aim of which is "to support all languages with a harmonious look and feel", has also released a Deseret font under the name "Noto Sans Deseret". George Douros maintains a public domain font called "Analecta" as part of his Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts project, which supports the Coptic, Gothic, and Deseret scripts. Deseret glyphs are also available in the popular pan-Unicode fonts Code2001 and Everson Mono (as of version 5.1.5).

Alphabet

Although the Deseret alphabet has letter case, usually the only difference between the minuscule and majuscule forms is that the majuscule forms are larger.

A degree of free spelling is allowed to accommodate dialectal differences in English. For example, in the Deseret edition of ''The Book of Mormon'', the word "wherefore" is written as wine–whine merger. Those who do exhibit the merger might instead prefer the spelling dialect