Review
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Title: The Deseret Alphabet: A Fixed and Unalterable Sound
Authors: Ryan K. Shosted, N. E. Davis
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Genre: Non-fiction
Year Published: 2026
Number of Pages: 276
Binding: Paper
ISBN: 978-0-252-08942-8
Price: $25.00
Reviewed by El Call for the Association of Mormon Letters
Introduction
The authors of The Deseret Alphabet: A Fixed and Unalterable Sound explain in the introduction:
The alphabet satisfies the thirst for “myth” among Mormons confronted by the “spiritual dryness” brought about by the relentless accommodationism of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Simply put, the alphabet helps “keep Mormonism weird” (pg. 3).
As a personal proponent of “keep Mormonism weird,” I’m also a fan of the Deseret Alphabet. My background in linguistics is not in phonetics or phonology — Shosted is a “phonetician and phonologist,” according to his website — but I’m drawn to the script anyway.[1]
I was particularly interested in this book, which I ultimately think has valuable content to add to the Mormon studies field. However, I have some significant critiques that prevent me from giving A Fixed and Unalterable Sound a wholehearted recommendation.
Positives
First, the positives. The book provides what appears to be a thorough bibliography of primary and secondary sources related to the Deseret Alphabet. This includes known documents written in the Deseret (the wording used throughout the book), as well as known scribes. All of this is enormously valuable to future scholars. Shosted and Davis also provide linguistic analysis of the variations of the Deseret in terms of symbols, pronunciation, and usage patterns. The overall contextualization of the Deseret within its original goals and eventual outcomes is also interesting.
Critiques
The “Flour Note”
One of my primary concerns with A Fixed and Unalterable Sound is a crucial part of the timeline presented in the book. In May 2024, the authors came across what they claim is the earliest example of writing in the Deseret. The “Flour Note,” as they call it, purports to have been written by George Watt to Brigham Young in March 1853, well before the adoption of the alphabet in December of that year. While the authors provide theories as to how this affects who could have created the Deseret, the overall attempt to integrate this belated discovery falls flat. Paragraphs throughout the book often end with sentences that awkwardly attempt to recontextualize the timeline with the note.
More importantly, I think there is at least some possibility that Watt simply wrote the wrong year on the note. Given the 1853 and 1854 timelines presented in the book, the note makes much more sense to have been written in 1854, rather than in the year prior. (In fact, endnote 33 for Chapter 6 highlights a journal with mislabeled years.)
It’s still possible that the “Flour Note” is the earliest example of writing in the Deseret. However, in order to validate that, I think it’s necessary to do additional historical work to determine if the note could have been written in the following year. If the note does still make more sense to have been written in 1853, then the book needs to more adequately integrate the existence of the note into the text and analysis of the timeline.
Unclear Audience
More broadly speaking, this book does not seem to know who its audience is. This is evident in their explanations of phonetic sounds, their choice of vocabulary, and other stylistic features.
I found at least one of the authors recommending this book on various Mormon subreddits, which would indicate the book was at least somewhat intended to be read by a non-academic audience. The actual content, however, does not make the audience clear.
Phonetic Explanations
In regard to phonetic sounds, the authors provide a table of the Deseret Alphabet characters, along with International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) characters, a “lexical set,” and a romanization for each sound. They explain that throughout the book they will use lexical sets as they “are at once more flexible and (for our purposes) desirably less precise, as they circumscribe various pronunciations across different dialects.” However, immediately after that, they note that “There is broad consensus on which IPA characters should be associated with the Deseret glyphs for General American English.” Their explanation for not using IPA characters is that they want to make the alphabet more accessible and “are reluctant to burden non-specialists with another alphabetic system in addition to the Deseret.” Their solution (in addition to the lexical sets) is to “employ a relatively intuitive romanization when needed.”
Given that there is a broad consensus on IPA symbols, it would have made sense to include them for those who are familiar with the IPA. The fact that they did not do so suggests that their audience was not intended to be other linguists. This seems peculiar for a book about a specific script that, to some extent, attempted to reach the same goal that IPA accomplishes.
Their usage of lexical sets was also inconsistent, especially with the schwa sound. This sound is typically described as “the last vowel in COMMA,” but at other times the authors simply use the word “schwa.”
Overall, this is not a massive issue, but it does muddy the question of audience.
Vocabulary
The next issue of vocabulary bothered me significantly more, and that’s coming from someone who likes and uses relatively obscure words on a regular basis. I don’t mind when new vocabulary is relevant to the text; the book’s usage of syllabographic makes sense within the context of the topic, and the authors provide a definition and examples of the term.
More frustratingly, the book is littered with obscure terms that are only used once (twice at the most). While some of these terms might be more precise than others in their definitions and connotations, their usage does not provide any substantial benefit to the text. For example, both brachygraphy and amanuensis are technically relevant terms; shorthand and scribe (respectively) are sufficient to get the overall message across to the readers. (A sample of about 70 terms includes: abditive, afflatus, cosmogonic, exergue, numinous, obloquious, polyergic, probouleutic, revanchism, and skep.)
I’ll spare you the details of the linguistic analysis that I performed to figure out whether I just didn’t have a broad enough vocabulary or if these really were quite obscure words. Simply put, at least 60% of the approximately 70 terms I flagged in my reading are very obscure. This matters when trying to establish the intended audience for the book. If this is not a book for linguists (as suggested by the lack of IPA usage), then linguistic terminology can be included, but should be adequately explained to a non-linguist audience. Even if a non-academic audience is a consideration for this book, there are simply too many obscure vocabulary terms and allusions to recommend it (especially when a significant handful of terms don’t even show up in Merriam-Webster).
General Stylistic Issues
Some of my other stylistic issues with the book fall less into neat categories. For example, the use of the phrase “temple cultus” without additional discussion of its lack of negative connotations is indicative of a more academic audience. Similarly, the tone of other sentences is a bit baffling, like in chapter two, where a description of W. W. Phelps notes that “he retained pretensions to the church printery throughout his lifetime,” while the cited source highlights Phelps’ official printing responsibilities.
A number of the sentences in the book include unnecessary information, again in chapter two, where it explains that “Snow was sent to St. Louis in 1854. ‘Mound City,’ as some still called it, had lately become a depot for immigrating Latter-day Saints.” This reference to “Mound City” is never mentioned again, leaving me wondering if there was a connotational meaning I was supposed to have drawn from including the reference (which lacks a citation).
Citation Issues
In fact, I found the citations in general to be idiosyncratic. At times, notable information felt left in the endnotes, while at other times, bold statements and positions on Mormon theology went uncited, especially when there was certainly research that could have been included.
One example that I looked into was the claim regarding Jaredites and the Adamic language. In discussing the language used by Adam in the Garden of Eden, the authors note a theory regarding the Jaredites and how they may have retained the Adamic language in the Americas. With no citations and an aspect of Mormon folklore I wasn’t familiar with, I went looking for a source. No Sunday school or seminary manual on the Book of Mormon came to any conclusions about the language of the Jaredites (from the ones I could access, since the 1970s). However, the Institute manuals from both 1979 (pg. 478) and 2009 (pg. 362) draw on Joseph Fielding Smith’s claim in The Way to Perfection that the Jaredites spoke the language of Adam. The 2003 Book of Mormon Sunday School Manual does note that it was only after the language of Jared’s family was confounded that they went to the Lord (pg. 210), which suggests that there are certainly more possibilities for interpretation that are barely acknowledged in The Deseret Alphabet. (The impact of various manuals on actual beliefs of individuals is difficult to determine, so it’s difficult to argue whether these manuals had a significant impact on individual theories of the Adamic language.)
Other Thoughts
The organization of the book itself makes it difficult to gain a full understanding of the cultural context of the Deseret. The first chapter covers the orthographic reforms prior to the timeline for the Deseret, while chapters two and three cover 1837-1858 and 1858-1878, respectively. Chapter 4 gives a linguistic analysis, while Chapters 5-7 cover the practical, social, and spiritual purposes of the Deseret. Chapter 8 discusses the use of the Deseret post-1878. Although I can understand the reasoning for this organization, I do feel like it inhibits full contextualization of the historical, social, and spiritual circumstances. It also created a tendency for the authors to repeat themselves when discussing similar historical time periods during chapters 5-7, and made it more difficult to draw connections between various purposes of the Deseret.
Perhaps due to the book’s structural organization, the authors neglect to fully situate the Deseret within a broader social context, especially after its development. This may be due to the fact that the Deseret did not have a significant impact on the Mormon culture, let alone the world, but it does feel necessary to contextualize the experiment within other similar efforts. For example, although the IPA was developed about a decade after the Deseret had fallen out of use, discussion of it was limited to offhand mentions and an endnote, but it could have provided valuable historical context to those unfamiliar with the system. Additionally, discussion of constructed languages such as Esperanto (published in 1887), whose goals mirrored those of the early Saints, is essentially absent.
I did find the discussion of millennialism in the context of the original goal of the Deseret to be fascinating, if a bit scattered organizationally throughout the book. Again, I think this could have benefited from positioning the Deseret in a larger context of languages (especially conlangs [constructed languages]) with intended goals and their outcomes. In some respects, Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue project with Láadan was one with similar goals to the Deseret (at the outset) and a similar failure (lack of wide uptake).
The authors note the usage of the Deseret Alphabet by #DezNat, tying the script’s modern usage to “theological conservatism” in the introduction. That being said, I think it ignores the use of the Deseret Alphabet by queer Mormons (especially as one of the symbols of the alphabet is glossed as “gay.”) While this anecdotal usage is more likely to be seen on tumblr than on Twitter/X, it supports the authors’ conclusion that “Today’s users of the Deseret are idealists” (p. 175) and is worth further exploration.
The authors do not explicitly acknowledge the gendered aspects of the Deseret, which is a potential avenue for further research. Of the individuals “known to have written, edited, or proofread specific documents using the Deseret Alphabet in the nineteenth century,” (p. 177), only two of them are women, with an unnamed third woman mentioned elsewhere. At least one other woman was known to have taught her child the Deseret Alphabet, but in practice, it appears that men were primarily involved with the development, distribution, and usage of the Deseret. The implications of this gender imbalance could be worth investigating.
Conclusion
Overall, while this book collates valuable resources for the Deseret and presents useful linguistic analysis, I hesitate to fully recommend this book. I think it had a lot of potential, but ultimately fell short.
- I do also share somewhat of a computer science background with Davis, the other author, but that’s less immediately relevant to this topic.