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Joseph Smith was the only one who could translate Reformed Egyptian, that being the case, we are never going to get to the nub of the matter, unless we find similar 'hieroglyphic style' writing in America.

A friend recently gave me an article on the Mikmaq and I was immediately struck by the similarities between the early mikmaq glyphs and what we have been told is reformed egyptian.
The Mikmaq glyphs are to the casual reader quite similar to the R E glyphs that Joseph Smith purported to be the language of the gold plates. Have any scholars checked out the similarities?
Could Joseph Smith or SR have had contact with these Native American's from the Algonquins, it looks like their hieroglyphs would be easy to copy/imitate.
After all if you want a 'language' that looks real, but you want no one else to be able to translate, wouldn't imitation of a tribal hieroglyphic style be the ideal medium to use? Of course some of you good folks may already be familiar with the Mikmaq similarity, for me, I have just stumbled upon it. Thoughts please.

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/mikmaq.htm

I meant to put this in the terrestrial forum, sorry.
If Dr. Shades wishes to move it, then fine.

Richard Stout has pretty well pinned it down as an obsolete form of shorthand.

http://olivercowdery.com/smithhome/2000s/2001RBSt.htm

MCB wrote:Richard Stout has pretty well pinned it down as an obsolete form of shorthand.

http://olivercowdery.com/smithhome/2000s/2001RBSt.htm

Uncle Dale sure does have some interesting articles on his site.

Thanks MCB,

Even in my convert days, I never accepted Reformed Egyptian as real, but I never thought of it as a form of shorthand. A more esoteric form totally unlike Pitman's and the usual styles that we see.

Of course with this, Joseph Smith could and did make it into whatever he wanted folk to believe at the time.

a

Anthon:



From Stout;s series of articles:

The column on the left is made up of
characters from the "Anthon transcript,
The column on the right contains
Tironian notes, the Latin shorthand
upon which early modern shorthand
was based.

Welcome, Colby.

Hi Colby,
Welcome to the board.
I appreciate where you are coming from on this, but there is similarity to Mikmaq or other forms of hieroglyphs which were used as as a shorthand prior to some tribes adopting written language.
Your problem with accepting that the Book of Mormon was written in Reformed Egyptian was/is that no other scholars outside of the LDS accept the so called revealed 'truth' of the actual existence of Reformed Egyptian.
Hugh Nibley, whatever he said about the characters being of Reformed Egyptian in fashion, was simply supporting the Prophet.
Mormon 9 verse 34 "none other people knoweth our language". So even if you take the apologist route into this, Nibley was wrong, simply because of what the Book of Mormon verse states.
You would have expected at least some, of the characters from the Gold Plates to resemble the more commonly pictorial hieroglyphs that Egyptologists are familiar with.
It was of course fortuitous for Joseph Smith to have in his hands at a later time, the Papyri and items we now know as the Facsimiles, for now for the first time he actually had some Egyptian hieroglyphs, with which to try and convince people, of course we now have the fictional Book of Abraham, which he invented from these scraps and a hypocephalus.

I have always thought that some of the symbols were based on astrological symbols. Not just the common ones but aspects and the like used in drawing up horoscopes. JSJr would have been familiar with these.

Probably there was no one source, they would have been a mishmash.

a