A cousin of Joseph Smith Jr. and brother of apostle and Church Historian George A. Smith,
John Lyman Smith used the Deseret Alphabet intermittently between 6 June 1859
and 25 February 1860, chiefly in June and July; only two Deseret words appear in the February entry.
The manuscript, written in Smithโs hand, combines Roman cursive with scriptura quadrata and
cursive writing in the Deseret Alphabet.
Most of Smithโs Deseret material dates from June and July 1859. Smith commonly
used the alphabet to write days of the week and months rather than for extended
prose, so the journal preserves relatively few complete sentences.
His spelling is idiosyncratic (June appears three different ways),
but the small amount of Deseret material
and limited variety of words make broad conclusions difficult.
Even so, the manuscript offers evidence of an individual writer learning
and testing the alphabet in ordinary journal practice.
Smithโs writing is particularly notable for preserving the voiced fricative ⟨๐⟩
[z] in the word Deseret (pp. 39, 42). This agrees with the pronunciation found in
modern Utah English, while the 1868โ1869 Deseret texts edited by Orson Pratt
represent the word with ⟨๐
⟩ [s]. By February 1860, Smith also spelled
the word using ⟨๐
⟩ (p. 81).
Manuscript detail: