Continuing from the last three posts regarding both
early Peruvian languages, and the place of both Aymara and Quechua languages in
Andean Peru today.
The earlier example about
English changing between 1000 AD and 2000 A.D., is only one of thousands of
examples that could be used to show the drastic changes that take place in a
living language over time. That Moroni and Mormon could read these earlier
reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics that Nephi and others used in recording their
record only shows that when you see the changes over time that is made in a
language, you can read the before and after examples. However, when a language
stops being used, and linguists know that language at that time, they can read
it thousands of years later. But when a language continues to alter and change
over a thousand year period, unknown to a linguist that knew it in the
beginning, they would be hard pressed to understand the language after such a
period of change—likely it would appear as “scribbling” if the glyphs had
changed dramatically.
Early Egyptologists (along with some of
their wives) unwrapping a mummy under the direction of the lead physician Daniel
Marie Fouquet, with Maspero to his right
While this is only common
sense, it is interesting that these Egyptologist linguists cannot understand
that or at least do not take it into consideration. Obviously, they cannot read the writing because it is not the same as
that which they studied in antiquity because it was altered through a thousand years of use. And that alteration makes
it unreadable to anyone unless they have a key
in which to understand it. For the ancient Egyptian language, the key was the Rosetta stone—a black basalt slab bearing an
inscription dating from the year 196 B.C., found by Napoleon’s troops who were
digging an extension foundation for a fort near the town of el-Rashid (Rosetta)
in the Nile Delta, Lower Egypt. The importance of the Stone lay in the fact
that the Egyptian hieroglyphic text was accompanied by the Greek translation,
which could be read and understood by scholars. A third inscription on the
stone was written in Demotic, a cursive script developed late in Egyptian
history and used in most cases only for secular documents.
Left: Eguptian hieroglyphs from about 2500 B.C. to 400 A.D. After that, it became a dead or "unknown" language not spoken or understood by anyone until the discovery of trhe Rosetta Stone in 1799; Right: Changes in Egyptian writing or language from Hieroglyph to Demotic to Coptic, the latter two considered scripts
For the Maya language it was a
series of keys, that unlike the Rosetta Stone,
involved a long series of hunches and tantalizing insights as well as false
leads, blind alleys, and heated disagreements among scholars. Not until a
significant breakthrough came with a brilliant discovery by David Stuart, just
out of high school and later a student at the University of Texas at Austin,
and the challenging theories of Soviet linguist Yuri Knorosov, who showed that
Maya writing was a combination of signs for complete words and symbols for
syllables, and was, in theory, capable of conveying any word in the Maya
language and therefore a rich range of content, was the language deciphered to
some degree, though this work is still in progress. The newest discovery by linguists is in the claiming a still-surviving version
of the sacred religious language of the ancient Maya is the key to interpreting
Mayan hieroglyphic texts that for years have defied interpretation.
There are at least 21 different Mayan languages in Mesoamerica, with K'iche' being the most spoken with 2.3 million speakers and the largest indigenous population in Guatemala. Yucatec is the widest spoken Mayan language in Mexico and a portion of those in the Yucatan. Mayan hieroglyphic script was widespread from 250-900 A.D.
These archaeologists and linguists have
identified a little-known native Indian language as the descendant of the elite
tongue spoken by rulers and religious leaders of the ancient Maya, a language
called Ch'orti—spoken today by just a few thousand Guatemalan Indians. Over the
next few years dozens of linguists and anthropologists are expected to start
mining this Ch'orti language and culture for words and expressions. Up until
now, scholars had thought that, in spoken form, the ancient Maya elite sacred
language was extinct, but research by a team led by archaeologist Professor
Steven Houston and linguist Professor John Robertson of Brigham Young
University, has now shown that Ch'orti evolved directly out of that sacred
language that descended from the original language spoken throughout an area of
what is now Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and southern Mexico. Archaeological
research has shown that as the civilization progressed and spread, other
Central American Maya languages came to be spoken. But because of its
association with the first Maya civilization, successive generations of Maya
elites preserved proto-Ch'orti as a sacred language.
For Joseph Smith, of course, it was the Urim
and Thummim, an instrument mentioned several
times in the Old Testament as “A Means of Revelation in Ancient Israel.” That
is, this instrument was actually used in ancient Israel as a means of
receiving revelation from God.
For the modern Egyptologist
who so quickly discredits the glyphs, there is no key.
And this brings us back to the
language of the Book of Mormon. At the present time, we have no key to Reformed
Egyptian, nor do we even have the text of Reformed Egyptian in hand. So for
those who want to know more about the Reformed Egyptian of which Mormon and the
others wrote on the plates, we will simply have to wait upon the Lord.
As for the languages we find
in existence now in the Land of Promise, there are those who identify the
Quechua and Aymara of the Peruvian carry-overs from the Nephite-Lamanite
period.
Contrary to popular belief, Quechua
did not originate with the Inca, but was already widely spoken across the
Central Andes long before the time of the Incas, who established it as their official
language of administration for their Empire. According to Paul Heggarty, who specializes in Andean languages of the Quechua
family, and a linguist in comparative linguistics from the University of
Cambridge, U.K., and associated with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, while Quechua is still spoken today in various regional forms
(dialects) by some 10 million people throughout much of western South America,
mostly in Peru, the
language dates back at least a thousand years before the Inca, making it in
existence at the time of the end of the Nephite Nation.
About twenty-five percent of all Peruvians speak
Quechua, and one-third of those do not speak any other language. It is also spoken in Bolivia, southern
Colombia, north-western Argentina, and northern Chile, as well as Ecuador,where
more than on million people speak the
language, which they call Quichua. It is the most widely spoken language of the
indigenous peoples of the Americas. These indigenous
natives refer to their language as Runasimi, (runa "people" and simi "mouth") meaning the "language of the people."
Long
before the Inca rose to power in the 15th century, Quechua was
spoken in places like Chavín, with the Original Quechua most likely spoken
first of all in Central Peru, perhaps on the coast but more likely in the
highland interior, and though there are several Quechuan dialects in the Andes,
they stem from a common beginning, though the more distant dialects are apart,
the more difficult it is for one group to understand another group.
The Quechua language was spoken almost entirely in the north (Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador), while the Aymara language was an is spoken almost entirely in the south (southern Peru and Chile)
Quechua has been written using
the Roman alphabet since the Spanish conquest of Peru. However, written Quechua
is not utilized by the Quechua-speaking people at large due to the lack of
printed referential material in Quechua. Until the 20th century, Quechua was
written with a Spanish-based orthography, allowing many Quechuan words to make
their way into Spanish and English. Some common English words derived from
Quechua are: coca, condor, guano,
gaucho, guanaco, Inca, jerky, lima [bean], llama, pampa, puma, quipu, quinine,
quinoa, and vicuña.
In addition, the cardinal numbers
in Quechua are: ch'usaq (0), huk (1), iskay (2), kimsa (3), tawa (4), pichqa
(5), suqta (6), qanchis (7), pusaq (8), isqun (9), chunka (10), chunka hukniyuq
(11), chunka iskayniyuq (12), iskay chunka (20), pachak (100), waranqa (1,000),
hunu (1,000,000), lluna, (1,000,000,000,000).
Though Quechua is
traditionally referred to as a single language, many linguists treat it as a
family of related Quechuan langauges, with
approximately 46 dialects, including Alfredo Torero, upon whose work and
analysis the present classification of the Quechua language family is
fundamentally based.
Much more could be
written about Quechua and Aymara, the two basic languages of indigenous Peru,
or the Andes, that fit well into the understanding we have of the two langauges
used by the Nephite Nation, and more specifically, the two languages (with
other dialectual usage) that is found among the Nephites throughout their
history. What that language eventually deteriorated into, as it is now found,
can not be evaluated because of the lack of a central language system between
600 B.C. and 1525 A.D., when the Spanish arrived and there would be no reason
to expect to be duplicative. However, two basic languages showing a survival
factor used by nearly everyone of that linage today, should suggest a
connection worth investigating, and probably would, except for those interested
in such things professionally are so dedicated to the Maya language and the
Mesoamerican theme.
It might be found at
some point in the future, if such resources could be freed from the fruitless
research into the Mayan language in connection to the Book of Mormon, and more
effort placed in the location of the Land of promise, i.e., the Quechua and
Aymara languages.
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