I have heard the claim that Demotic and the Anthon Transcript characters look almost exactly the same. This clarifies that they do not! Some people are terribly desperate to keep believing that their beloved church is true. After many years of sacrifice and devotion...who wants to feel that they wasted their life? I struggle with these feelings of waste all the time, but I cannot and will not slide back into belief in that fake church with its fake prophets.
Have you seen Jerry Grover's attempt at translating the Caractors doc? It’s a valiant effort. Assumes connections with a few languages, including Mayan. I can’t remember if Demotic was one of them.
Right, and he incorrectly assumed that hieroglyphics were symbolic (each picture/glyph representing a large phrase) and not phonetic. He picked just the right time, barely, to be able to do that, as the Rosetta Stone translation hadn’t been disseminated worldwide yet. Clever con, but still a con.
In fact, the very reason they are called hieroglyphics- sacred writing- is that form the middle ages on it was widely believed that not only were they symbolic, but that they were mystical, and that they held the key to the Western version of Nirvana/satori, which one could attain by meditating while gazing intently upon them. Rosetta burst a lot of bubbles.
Mormon 9:33 And if our plates had been sufficiently large we should have written in Hebrew; but the Hebrew hath been altered by us also; and if we could have written in Hebrew, behold, ye would have had no imperfection in our record.
Introducing "imperfection" into a sacred record is kind of a big deal. Was Demotic more space efficient than Hebrew? No.
"...and if we could have written in Hebrew, behold, ye would have had no imperfection in our record."
In other words: "Hey, Sidney, maybe we should put in a line about possible mistakes, because I can't keep track of what the hell's in this damn manuscript any more."
"Good idea, Joseph, future apologists will have a catch-all excuse in case we messed up somewhere--because frankly, I can't keep track of it either, especially after that idiot Harris lost 116 pages."
Chicken N. Backpacks Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > "...and if we could have written in Hebrew, > behold, ye would have had no imperfection in our > record." > > In other words: "Hey, Sidney, maybe we should > put in a line about possible mistakes, because I > can't keep track of what the hell's in this damn > manuscript any more." > > "Good idea, Joseph, future apologists will have > a catch-all excuse in case we messed up > somewhere--because frankly, I can't keep track of > it either, especially after that idiot Harris lost > 116 pages."
Maybe not in those exact words, but I'm sure that's how the conversation went. The production of the BoM wasn't the smoothest process. And printing deadlines made it worse. There was money to be had (or so they thought).
Here is how it was explained to me 50 years ago in Sunday School.
First lets write the word before
BEFORE
Now we draw a honey bee (I'll use the & to represent the bee) followed by the number 4.
&4
Now both say before but we reduced it from 5 letters to two character. So using picture writting like egyptian reduces the space needed to write.
I know now that in neither Egyptian, Mayan or any other picture writing system that each possible word has a single glyph. But when I was 10 I didn't know better. .
JS possibly (possibly, not absolutely) knew that glyphs had been discovered in Central America but did not know exactly what they looked like. But he understood them to be similar, but not identical to, Egyptian hieroglyphs.
He made some shit up so the Native American mound builders in his book could have a written language and called it Reformed Egyptian.
Rodney Meldrum keeps teaching people that the MicMac writing is almost exactly the same as the Anthon Transcript. Thus a misinformed people continue "knowing" that the LDS church is true. They keep telling people outside the church that there's lots of evidence for the church. They don't understand why so few want to join up, when it is so "obvious" to them. I myself was a gullible and naive teenager. I was so excited when the missionaries taught me about the fulfilled Isaiah prophecy! "I cannot read a sealed book". But even though gullible, I wasn't stupid. If the internet had been around, I would have looked it up.
You Too? Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > JS possibly (possibly, not absolutely) knew that > glyphs had been discovered in Central America but > did not know exactly what they looked like. But > he understood them to be similar, but not > identical to, Egyptian hieroglyphs. > > He made some shit up so the Native American mound > builders in his book could have a written language > and called it Reformed Egyptian.
"View of the Hebrews" mentions hieroglyphs found among the ancient American sites. Just one example:
"And it is as natural an event that their brethren, in the wilds of America, should place them in their silent hieroglyphical paintings. Whence could have been derived the knowledge of the accurate hieroglyphical paintings, which this most learned author exhibits as found among some of the Indians; unless they had learned them from people to whom the knowledge of hieroglyphics had been transmitted from Egypt, its original source?" --Ethan Smith, View of the Hebrews, 2nd ed. 1825, p 140
I keep finding scholars in different places online who laugh at the concept of Reformed Egyptian. "No such possible language", Egyptologists and linguists will say. If Demotic were Reformed Egyptian, someone among them would have a sense of it. I know from experience that Rod Meldrum and Wayne May can't be trusted, yet so many Mormons are deceived by them.