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).
