Friday, October 6, 2023

Excerpt from Mackay and Belnap, "The Pure Language Project"

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)