Joseph Smith's "Reformed Egyptian" doesn't exist, but the words you are reading are composed of letters created by ancient Hebrews or Canaanites who couldn't speak or read Egyptian.


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A table illustrating the evolution of the alphabet from the hieroglyphs that inspired it to more recent scripts

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/01/07/17/37731400-9122891-image-a-48_1610039079614.jpg


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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/inventing-alphabet-180976520/


In 1905, a couple of Egyptologists, Sir William and Hilda Flinders Petrie, who were married, first excavated the temple, documenting thousands of votive offerings there. The pair also discovered curious signs on the side of a mine, and began to notice them elsewhere, on walls and small statues. Some signs were clearly related to hieroglyphs, yet they were simpler than the beautiful pictorial Egyptian script on the temple walls. The Petries recognized the signs as an alphabet, though decoding the letters would take another decade, and tracing the source of the invention far longer.

The Flinders Petries brought many of the prizes they had unearthed back to London, including a small, red sandstone sphinx with the same handful of letters on its side as those seen in the mines. After ten years of studying the inscriptions, in 1916 the Egyptologist Sir Alan Gardiner published his transcription of the letters and their translation: An inscription on the little sphinx, written in a Semitic dialect, read “Beloved of Ba’alat,” referring to the Canaanite goddess, consort of Ba’al, the powerful Canaanite god.

“For me, it’s worth all the gold in Egypt,” the Israeli Egyptologist Orly Goldwasser said of this little sphinx when we viewed it at the British Museum in late 2018. She had come to London to be interviewed for a BBC documentary about the history of writing. In the high-ceilinged Egypt and Sudan study room lined with bookcases, separated from the crowds in the public galleries by locked doors and iron staircases, a curator brought the sphinx out of its basket and placed it on a table, where Goldwasser and I marveled at it. “Every word we read and write started with him and his friends.” She explained how miners on Sinai would have gone about transforming a hieroglyph into a letter: “Call the picture by name, pick up only the first sound and discard the picture from your mind.” Thus, the hieroglyph for an ox, aleph, helped give a shape to the letter “a,” while the alphabet’s inventors derived “b” from the hieroglyph for “house,” bêt. These first two signs came to form the name of the system itself: alphabet. Some letters were borrowed from hieroglyphs, others drawn from life, until all the sounds of the language they spoke could be represented in written form.

Joe could read Reformed Egyptian.

That's nothing..., I can speak in Braille.

I don't see any similarity with Joseph Smith's 'caracters'.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthon_Transcript

Baffling, isn't it?

Reformed egyptian is de-formed English.

"They bought it." - Ferris Bueller

Just because it's made up doesn't mean it isn't true. If you eat shit but believe it's not shit, you haven't really eaten shit. Right?

I see Mormonism as a closed microcosm of the "real world". For example, you probably believe in property rights. To the Native American mind, before the conquest, the concept of owning land was as inconceivable as it was profane. But it's real and natural to us, the beneficiaries of guns and germs.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/08/2024 05:51AM by bradley.

I still love seeing the transition when students realize that those odd little squiggles on the paper or board represent sounds, and you can blend sounds together to make words that they recognize. It's like seeing a lightbulb go off in their heads. They get so excited when they can do that.

That language has a grammar and a logical basis. See if they can make sense of Joseph's doodles.