D
dzheremi
Guest
I can only go based on what the supposed experts say on the video. Notice I didn’t tear down every statement, only reacted to those I found most obviously suspicious. If there is fault, there is fault. If there is truth (and I DID affirm some of the concepts, such as the fact that scripts do evolve, and sometimes new scripts are adopted), there is truth. I don’t have it out for Mormonism so much as I love language and linguistics. It’s what I’ve chosen to do for a living. I don’t appreciate other people in the field trying to pervert it to try to prove a skewed worldview. As far as your claim that I “didn’t listen well enough” to pick up their arguments, how should I listen to arguments that are disconnected from their conclusions and contain falsehoods (did you click on my links for the Hebrew and Syriac alphabets? Did they look the same to you? Why would an expert make such an obvious mistake?), so that I can “pick them up”? I’ve heard them, but that doesn’t mean I buy into them.
Okay…
That’s fine. The Book of Mormon can claim whatever it wants. Since there is no evidence of this “Reformed Egyptian” as it is spoken of in the BoM, there is nothing to stop Mormons from saying “Reformed Egyptian” is whatever they want it to be. It’s never going muster with me or any other linguist outside of the LDS church unless they can provide some real evidence for it, but…
The key difference is that these scripts (which are not all “modifications” of Egyptian to begin with; Coptic is derived from the Greek script, with letters from the Demotic used to represent sounds not found in Greek) are ACTUALLY ATTESTED TO, whereas the “Reformed Egyptian” written of in the BoM is not. So, while you can use the fact that there are different scripts in use for different eras of Egyptian history to prove that…there are different scripts in use for different eras of Egyptian history (
), that fact does not actually do anything to make “Reformed Egyptian” a real, existent script, or address the many reasons why it is extremely implausible (no Hebrew speakers in the acient Americas, no traces of ANY form of “Egyptian” writing in the acient Americas, etc). As I’ve said in another argument about this issue, we cannot assume by default that anything that is not disprovable must be taken seriously in scientific investigation just because “we can’t know for sure”, especially in this case, because for at least SOME of the time period covered by the BoM, we DO know what form of writing was being used in Mesoamerica, and it ISN’T any form of Egyptian, “reformed” or otherwise. There is zero evidence of “Reformed Egyptian” or any Hebrew-speaking peoples in the ancient Americas. That’s the fact that you can’t get around barring some evidence to the contrary, which no Mormon or Mormon organization has been able to provide. So, given what we do know about the languages of Mesoamerica and the languages of the Near East, we can say with certainty that there is no reason to support this idea of “Reformed Egyptian” as it is written of in the BoM. It is pure fabrication. If Mormons would like to be taken seriously on this issue by mainstream linguists, they will need to produce actual physical evidence of “Reformed Egyptian”.Again, I wouldn’t use the term “reformed”, for reasons listed above and because it is vague, but if you are taking the Heiratic and Demotic to be “reformed” forms of Egyptian, then we actually DON’T need to ask that question. We already know the answer because we have evidence of the Heiratic and Demotic scripts.
You can ask that question if you’d like. Other professionals, from Anthon onward, have already dealt with Mormon claims and determined them to be baseless, so I’ll trust their judgments. No non-LDS linguist that I know of has ever accepted any of the supposed links that LDS magically manage to find, so I would still say that the onus is on YOU (not you, BDawg specifically, but the “scholars” who seek to bolster BoM claims) to present appropriate evidence of any such supposed links. So far, mainstream linguists, archaeologists, and Egyptologists are still waiting.
