Logistics And Examples Of Hebrew Being Written In Egyptian

[Robert F. Smith]

Hello. Might You possibly refer me to any on-line studies (good ones) on the AM (per our discussion). I would love to see anything along the same lines as Jone's work. One does wonder why more folk with a linguistic inclination and a penchant for trying to decypher the undecypherable aren't collaborating on this. I suppose not enough people with the background, desire and proximity.

 

I recall that Jones tried to match up part of the AM and the opening lines of the BOM. Do You remember if he had a background in Hebrew. I was going to write out that part of the text in my odd Hebrew and see if there were any patterns.  

 

Besides the Mi'kmaq connection (which i find complicated), has any one postulated the AM as a mnemonic system? What do You think of that possibility?

Several people have taken brief looks at the AT, but I am aware of no systematic, sustained efforts -- such as Michael Ventris on Linear B.  I can only provide a helpful bibiliography:

 

Buerger, David John, "A Preliminary Approach to Linguistic Aspects of the Anthon Transcript," copies available in the “David J. Buerger Papers,” on the  Mountain West Digital Library OAI server (http://biblioteca.universia.net/html_bura/ficha/params/title/david-j-buerger-papers/id/45117179.html ).

 

Gee, John, “Some Notes on the Anthon Transcript,” FARMS Review of Books 12/1 (2000):5–8, online at http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/review/?vol=12&num=1&id=329 .

 

"New Light: ‘Anthon Transcript’ Writing Found?" Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 8/1 (1999): 68–70, 79.  Online at http://publications.maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/jbms/8/1/S00000-501ad6810b52dJBMS%208-1%20Entire%20Issue%201-1.pdf .

 

MacKay, Michael Hubbard, Gerrit J. Dirkmaat, and Robin Scott Jensen, “ The ‘Caractors’ Document: New Light on an Early Transcription of the Book of Mormon Characters,” Mormon Historical Studies, 14/1 (Spring 2013), online at  http://www.academia.edu/5007828/_The_Caractors_Document_New_Light_on_an_Early_Transcription_of_the_Book_of_Mormon_Characters_Mormon_Historical_Studies_vol._14_No._1 .

 

A tool which sounds promising has been developed by scholars from MIT, USC, and the Univ. of Uppsala, Sweden.  It has been used to decipher Ugaritic using Hebrew as a Rosetta language, but that was only a test.  More impressive has been their decipherment of the 18^th century Copiale Cypher, using decipherment algorithms and pattern-finding tools:  http://youtube.com/watch?v=Eam0Tk-1FyI .

 

Snyder, Benjamin (MIT), Regina Barzilay (MIT), and Kevin Knight (USC), “A Statistical Method for Lost Language Decipherment,” Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Uppsala Univ.), 10 (July 2010), 1048-1057, online at http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/mt/acl10.uga.pdf .  They use a generative Bayesian model.  Their abstract describes

 

a method for the automatic decipherment of lost languages.  Given a non-parallel corpus in a known related language, our model produces both alphabetic mappings and translations of words into their corresponding cognates.  We employ a non-parametric Bayesian framework to simultaneously capture both low-level character mappings and high level morphemic correspondences. This formulation enables us to encode some of the linguistic intuitions that have guided human decipherers. When applied to the ancient Semitic language Ugaritic, the model correctly maps 29 of 30 letters to their Hebrew counterparts, and deduces the correct Hebrew cognate for 60% of the Ugaritic words which have cognates in Hebrew.

 

Knight, Kevin, and Kenji Yamada, “A computational approach to deciphering unknown scripts,” In ACL Workship on Unsupervised Learning in Natural Language Processing, 1999.

 

Knight, Kevin, Anish Nair, Nishit Rathod, and Kenji Yamada, “Unsupervised analysis for decipherment Problems,” In Proceedings of the COLING/ACL, 2006, pages 499–506.

 

Knight, Kevin, and Richard Sproat, “Writing systems, transliteration and decipherment,” NAACL 2009.  Tutorial.

[LittleNipper]

The question is not if Scripture was ever written in "Egyptian." The problem has always been if any particular document of Egyptian has any relevance to a "reputed" translation/understanding...

Edited January 21, 2015 by LittleNipper

[DragonLancer]

Not that it may be of much use for the Anthon Transcript script, but I find it an interesting observation that there were only 24 gold plates in the Jaredite plates made by Ether and found by the people of Limhi, that gave the full history from the creation of the world down to the end of the Jaredite civilization.  Only 24 plates (double sided pages?) containing characters.  But perhaps "reformed" Egyptian was similar.  The observation made by Hillel2 seems very important here where he says:

 

A short hand system would be better.

 

Yet many of the characters are extremely complex which is not typical of short-hand.

 

Of course, in considering the AM as a genuine document of some sorts, could the script actually be entirely "pictorgraphic?" The Aztec speakers of Nahuatl, for example, did not have a developed writing system like that of the Maya. Basically, they drew pictures of events and had a handful of symbols that contextualized them (in the past, sequential, e.g. "it came to pass" sorts of symbols) If the symbols are basically just pictures (albeit of a highly highly abstract nature) they would just suggest an event known to the readers yet read differently by every reader (as different people would verbalize differently a picture of a man walking down a staircase holding a briefcase). Now there is no need for an underlying language like Hebrew. Though the Nephites may have spoken some kind of Hebrew, the underlying system is essentially just memory. Non-Hebrew speaking Nephites would have understood the pictures in the same way because they knew the back ground of events. Outsiders who did not, would just see a bunch of highly abstract pictures and not know what they were referring to.  A system of understood, highly abstract pictograms could be a very economical way to get a lot of information onto a small surface but we have to know the events ahead of time to get to the meaning. Ordinary mortals can't extract the meaning from the pictures without knowledge of the events (too abstract) unless one posits the use of "seership" which Joseph Smith is believed to have had by those who have faith in what he said. The other thing is that, at this point, we have actually moved backwards in the development of writing (from logo-graphic-phonetic to pictographic) which, though possible under the restraints of Mormon's environment, would be very very unusual.

 

 

In my studies of the KEP it seems, a "shorthand" system mixed with a pictographic system is evident.  On one level, in other threads, I have mentioned the fact that it seems that the Sensen Characters in the KEP usage are pictographic, having themes from the Book of Abraham sections, as they are used for markers in the Book of Abraham manuscripts.  But the "shorthand" is in the packing of other themes into the same characters by way of an invention of a system of using pieces of each and every character like the wedjat eye, and assigning meaning to their sections.  So, by "dissection", one breaks apart the characters into their component parts, the characters become ligatures, or something similar to a monogram having multiple characters in one, overlaid sometimes, or the usage of the various strokes in a character as separate characters, etc.  Perhaps it was Joseph Smith's understanding of this "reformed" system of Egyptian that led him to interpret the Sensen papyrus in this manner, rather than the standard Egyptological system.

 

http://egyptianalphabetandgrammar.blogspot.com/2013/12/lexemes-introduction-to-concept-of.html

[Robert F. Smith]

The question is not if Scripture was ever written in "Egyptian." The problem has always been if any particular document of Egyptian has any relevance to a "reputed" translation/understanding...

Perhaps you could expand on that thought just a bit.  Not sure what you mean.