The following is an excerpt from Michael MacKay and Daniel Belnap’s paper on the English Language Documents (ELD). It is a game-changer and should represent the final nail in the coffin of the understanding of these papers popularized in the 1960s by Grant Heward and Jerald Tanner:
. . . the Abraham manuscripts could
also be closer to the Anthon transcripts, rather than actual translation
documents. There are several data points that suggest that they are not
translation documents. Probably the most obvious is the fact that Michael Rhodes
has demonstrated that the characters borrowed from the Egyptian papyri have a
different translation. If the text of the Abrahamic manuscripts is intended to
be a translation of the parallel Egyptian characters, then they are translated
incorrectly. (Michael D. Rhodes, The Hor Book of Breathings: A Translation
and Commentary [Provo: Brigham Young University, 2005]) When it comes to
translation as an academic practice of finding equivalencies between languages,
there is no translation in the Abrahamic manuscripts. Second, having two kinds
of characters (Egyptian and ELD amalgamations)
demonstrates that the Abrahamic manuscripts were not intended to demonstrate
the translation from Egyptian characters to English. In manuscript C, W. W.
Phelps adds three verses to the beginning of the manuscript. One of the
characters he adds is apparently from the facsimile 1 document (3.11a) (JSP,
4:370. See the sixth set of characters titled "Papyri") and not
document 10 where the rest of the Egyptian is drawn from. This means there are
characters from three different places used in the Abraham manuscripts: the
facsimile 1 document, document 10, and the ELD amalgamations (which are not
Egyptian characters from the papyri). Instead of a line-by-line translation, it
is more like a line-byline comparison or exploration of individual characters
from the papyri and the ELD. The alphabets demonstrate a similar pattern by copying
characters from the papyri, but never translating them. The characters in the
columns of the facsimile 1 fragment were copied sequentially, but they never
addressed the fact that the papyri were ripped causing there to be missing
characters above the columns. Instead, they copied them into the alphabets as
if they were individual characters without any syntax. This suggests that they
did not intend to translate the characters as sentences or as if they were
relative to the sequence they were recorded in on the fragment, since they listed
them as if the facsimile 1 fragment included the characters as an alphabetic
list too.
Finally, the Grammar and Alphabet
included almost no work on the Egyptian papyri characters. Instead, they
focused on developing a system of representation in which one combined simpler
characters together to form complex characters and more complicated meanings.
Putting the Grammar and Alphabet to use they combined simple characters
together to fill in the lacuna in document 10. If they were going to translate
document 10, they would have found the Egyptian characters that were missing
from the document. Instead, they filled the lacuna with ELD amalgamations.
Because of this, the Abraham manuscripts are likely not of the translation of
document 10 into English. (Michael MacKay and Daniel Belnap, "The Pure
Language Project," The Journal of Mormon History 49, no. 4 [2023]:
41-42)
