Thursday, November 14, 2019

Richard G. Grant on "reformed" Languages


Latter-day Saint apologist Richard G. Grant gives an interesting perspective on “reformed” (i.e., altered) languages (cf. Mormon 9:32-34 and “reformed Egyptian”):

There is an interesting people living in several communities of Northern California. They're called Hmongs. They come from the high hill country of Laos. Their language is ancient and to our ears it's hard to recognize it as speech. Moreover, they have no written language — that is, they have not until recently had a written language. Today, they use the characters of the English language to represent the sounds of Hmong. This could be called reformed English. Of course, it's not. It really is nothing like English and the characters we use to write English are not English characters — they're Roman. In this sense, English is really reformed Latin. Roman characters are used to write many languages. They're even used to render Chinese, Japanese, and Hebrew in a form more accessible to English speaking peoples. This also could be called a reformed Latin, however, it's generally called Romanized Chinese, Japanese, or Hebrew. (Richard G. Grant, "Reformed Egyptian: 'In the Language of My Fathers'")

On the topic of texts in “reformed Egyptian,” a useful resource I just encountered is that of LDS scholar Dr. David Calabro’s excellent article “The Hieratic Scribal Tradition in Preexilic Judah” showing how scribes in Judah employed Egyptian hieratic signs in their texts. It was published by a non-LDS venue, Archaeopress (the publishers of British Archaeological Reports).