Continuing from the last two posts regarding both
early Peruvian languages, and the place of Reformed Egyptian within today's
Egyptologist line of thinking.
Following the hieroglyphic period mentioned
in the last post, a fourth category, 4) "Late Egyptian" came into use—which was the
everyday language of the New Kingdom and the Third Intermediate Period (1550 -
700 BC) The best examples are secular documents from the Ramesside Period (1300
- 1080 BC). While Old and Middle Egyptian were similar, Late Egyptian was very
different in structure. Following this period came the 5) "Demotic,"—the ordinary
language successor of Late Egyptian written in a script called Demotic, from
the beginning of the Late Period to the end of Roman times (700 BC - 500 AD).
During this period, the official language of Egypt was Greek, and then Latin. And
lastly, 6) "Coptic"—the final stage of the language. It was written in the Greek
alphabet with a few letters borrowed from Egyptian. Because it continues to be
spoken by the Coptic church, it's the only version where we really know what is
sounds like.
Coptic Egyptian, which is typically considered a continuation of the
ancient Egyptian language but written with the Greek and Demotic alphabets
in the third century A.D. There were some attempts to write the ancient
Egyptian language using the Greek Alphabet before this time
Discoveries
made by Champollion have traced the "sculptured letters and alphabetical
signs" [of the Ancient Egyptians] to periods prior to the existence of
Abraham and Moses. Prior to his discoveries, from Heroditus, Plato, Tactitus,
Plutarch and others, it was suspected that Egypt had invented the method of
alphabetical writing.
After
Egypt was absorbed into the Roman Empire, a large volume of immigrants of
Greeks and Romans came into the country. Since they were largely unable to
grasp the intricacies of Egyptian scripts, they adopted a written version of
the Egyptian language now referred to as "Coptic" (transcribed into the Greek
alphabet with seven extra letters to express sounds not found in Greek).
It was used from around 200 A. D. until the
present. In focusing on hieroglyphic, which is the most famous, it began, like
all written language, as pictographic. Some languages, such as Chinese,
remained that way, but most, including Egyptian, evolved into a phonetic
system. More accurately, Egyptian was a consonantal system in which vowels were
not written down, like Arabic and Hebrew, although today we can look at spoken
Coptic to guess what the vowels may have been. For most of it's use,
hieroglyphics were used for monumental inscriptions and sacred religious texts.
Therefore, they would spend a lot of time on each symbol, and make it very
beautiful. However, this caused it to look a lot more iconographic than it is,
which later was a stumbling block to deciphering it. Of course, hieroglyphics
would most accurately be described as a mixed system since even when it was a
phonetic system, there were still some symbols that represented meaning.
This
all boils down to the fact that Egyptian hieroglyphics was a completely unknown
language in our time. The ancient Egyptian writing
began to be abandoned following the fourth and fifth century A.D. but it was used
side by side with the Coptic language until the fifth century A.D. The
Byzantine occupation of Egypt in the fourth century A.D. and the Arab conquest
of Egypt in the seventh century A.D., followed by the widespread use of Arabic,
caused the ancient Egyptian language (in Hieroglyphics, Hieratic, and Demotic)
to be totally forgotten, along with its scripts.
Over
the past 1500 years, Egyptian truly became an unknown language. Not until the Rosetta Stone
was found in 1799, which was the key to provide a means by which modern man
could decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphics, was it possible to begin studying
the dead languages again. From 1800 onward, about 215 years, we have had people
seriously working in the field of Egyptology again; however, had the Rosetta
Stone not been found, and no other key presented itself, it is likely we would
still not know what the hieroglyphics meant.
Still, it seems bordering on the arrogant
and certainly self-serving for Egyptologists to lay claim to knowing all the
different Egyptian variants and thousands of symbols to such an extent as to
claim there is no Reformed Egyptian language and that the symbols shown in the
Anthon text is totally without merit, being little more than “scribbling.”
Another interesting facet of this is that
the only reason modern man believed the Egyptian hieroglyphics meant anything
at all is because they were found inscribed and carved all over Egypt. But what
if these inscriptions had never been found, or that one man found some, found a
key, and interpreted them, writing them down in a lengthy but religious history of Egypt, but
then the inscriptions were once again lost. Might not the learned and the wise
believe that his was a forgery and that no such language ever existed?
Consequently,
there is nothing regarding such hieroglyphics that have been changed over these
two millennium and therefore Egyptologists have centered all their attention on
the distant past.
However, in a
living, dynamic language, such as we use today, there have been many changes
over their long period of use. The example of English seen in the previous post from Aelfric’s colloquy
of 1000 AD is merely one example. For any English expert of today, professional
in their linguistic ability, Old English (Anglo-Saxon) writing is much like “doodlings,”
looking much like a child playing on a typewriter. On the other hand, the
following examples may also look like gibberish:
2)
ghaHDaq tlheghHommey boSta'chu', teHlaw' net. toH, Dejpu' tlhegh Hommey
vam, ngo' bIH, 'ej bIH baghchuqlu'pu', 'ach tlheghHommey Sarqu' ghomchuqlu'.
'ach Hovvam botlhvo' narghtaHmo' naQHom, 'ej 'oH movlu'taHmo' 'oHvaD chongbogh
3) Oihÿæçhb gou höuiin qenjbnc, øiueamk,
feèdûxdx, foiûjb∂ fegn poiuknbl sf∂∂lcod, aesedx ig ytflrÿar mœbyjb diµ pkëbj
qwen fœujbçsgd sfll asdkfj oiu ãsdf piñ, asdßcx lkwevenk plmabemcd qaenijbcvon
siedpojuvp aernemeiggon ondi te
4)
Mega gratia de tu auxi difusi - tu puta-me pagina es fo stimula! Id sti
memo mi de u proto-tem mi pa vide - id es ta facili e habe mega pote pro munda
paci e kon-ergo.
5)
Mit en regeltik Grammatik ond en Wortbas wahlen familariet twen der
Spraakerens von der nuytide spraaks, planen tu utfuhren in en regional Skale,
wad die Esperanto ond andere planered for de Werld hav sielen.
The point is, to someone
unfamiliar with a language, no matter how astute a linguist they may be, the
unfamiliarity with an unknown and unrecognizable script will usually lead to a
negative response. “That is not a language,” “I’ve never heard of that before,”
“That looks like scribbling to me.”
The point here being that all
the languages above except one are real languages but none are included in the
list of Ethnologue’s 6,700+ languages
of the world. Ethnologue, by the way, lists the top 10 languages of the world as: Mandarin Chinese, Spanish,
English, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, German, and Wu Chinese,
encompassing 2,550,000,000 people using one of these as their main language.
We might also point out that
when Nephi said he began the record in reformed
Egyptian in 600 B.C., and Moroni says he concluded the record in 400 A.D.
in reformed Egyptian, and that it had
been altered by the Nephites, evidently over a 1000 year period, one can well
understand why no Egyptologist today can read the hieroglyphics Joseph Smith
noted in the so-called Anthon transcript. What is amazing is that no
Egyptologist can understand that such significant changes would be wrought over
this one thousand year period (600 B.C. – 400 A.D.) as to make their
understanding of the ancient hieroglyphics of Pharoah’s time not the same as an
ancient script four thousands year later.
(See
the next post, “Early Peruvian Languages-Part IV,” for
more understanding on the ancient languages of Peru, and why it is important
when understanding the Book of Mormon)
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