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Since all the American Indian tribes are Lamanites, descendats of Father Lehi, how many Hebrew/egyptian root words have survived to our day? They all came from the same ancestors and at one time spoke the same language. Surely there are remnant words to show the language drift over the years. You wouldn't lose everything, would you?

Maybe some Indian rock writings, cave paintings or such in Hebrew or reformed egyptian?

The basic answer is no.

In reality you can grab any two languages (mandrin chinese and dutch) and if you dig deep enough you can find simlarities. So really you would have to study linguistics to see if native american language are rooted in egyptian or hebrew, they are not.

However the church has dramatically changed its stance in recent years as to who the laminites actually were. For example in the time of Joeseph Smith the native americans in north america were infact the laminites. Joeseph Smith would often point out actual geographical locations of where different laminite or even nephite interactions occured. The majority of the church membership for the first 100 years of the church accepted that the primary ancestors of the native americans were in fact laminites.

Eventually the church changed its tune as to the geographical location of the Book of Mormon and we get a lot of Mormon scholars speculating where the nephites, laminates and jaredites probably were, most conclude in the more central parts of america. Depending on who you listen to you will get speculation that occurs anywhere from peru all the way to mexico or everywhere in between. There are a few scholars who still hold to the united states containing at least part of the geographical location of the Book of Mormon.

In the last couple decades however the laminites have become relatively obscure anscestors to native americans. The wording in the Book of Mormon intro has even been changed "After thousands of years, all were destroyed except the Lamanites, and they are among the ancestors of the American Indians."

The problem here is there has never been a Book of Mormon artifact found and there is no biological or cultural relation that would conclude that the native americans are related in the least to some Jews from Jerusalam. Modern native americans roots however can be traced back you just have to go west to asia not east to the middle east.

So if the Book of Mormon is an actual account of real people we have no other record of them (outside the Book of Mormon) and if there decendancts do still exist there blood line and culture has been so diluted that they are practically non existant.

Joseph wrote:Since all the American Indian tribes are Lamanites, descendats of Father Lehi, how many Hebrew/egyptian root words have survived to our day? They all came from the same ancestors and at one time spoke the same language. Surely there are remnant words to show the language drift over the years. You wouldn't lose everything, would you?

Maybe some Indian rock writings, cave paintings or such in Hebrew or reformed egyptian?

Professor Brian Stubbs has identified several hundred multi-syllabic Hebrew/Egyptian roots in the Uto/Aztecan language family. He has published a volume documenting them.

Skibum04 wrote:The basic answer is no.

In reality you can grab any two languages (mandrin chinese and dutch) and if you dig deep enough you can find simlarities. So really you would have to study linguistics to see if native american language are rooted in egyptian or hebrew, they are not.

Brian Stubbs is a linguist who specializes in Uto-Aztecan languages, and he has published in Mormon and non-Mormon publications that shows roughly 30% of the Uto-Aztecan lexicon is related to Afro-Asiatic languages (Egyptian, Hebrew, Aramaic, etc.). This is what a non-Mormon authority in linguistics had to say about Stubbs' research:

Stubbs finds Semitic and (more rarely) Egyptian vocabulary in about 20 of 25 extant Uto-Aztecan languages. Of the word-bases in these vernaculars, he finds about 40 percent to be derivable from nearly 500 triliteral Semitic stems. Despite this striking proportion, however, he does not regard Uto-Aztecan as a branch of Semitic or Afro-Asiatic. Indeed, he treats Uto-Aztecan Semitisms as borrowings. But, because these borrowings are at once so numerous and so well "nativized," he prefers to regard them as an example of linguistic creolization - that is, of massive lexical adaptation of one language group to another. (By way of analogy, . . . historical linguists regard the heavy importation of French vocabulary into Middle English as a process of creolization.)

Of the various Afro-Asiatic languages represented in Uto-Aztecan vocabulary, the following occur in descending order of frequency:

1. Canaanite (cited in its Hebrew form)
2. Aramaic
3. Arabic
4. Ethiopic
5. Akkadian (usually in its Assyrian form)
6. Ancient Egyptian

Among the many Semitic loan-words in Uto-Aztecan, the following, listed by Stubbs, seems unexceptionable as regards both form and meaning:

Hebrew baraq lightning > Papago berok lightning
Aramaic katpa shoulder > Papago kotva shoulder
Hebrew hiskal be prudent > Nahua iskal be prudent
Hebrew yesïväh sitting > Hopi yesiva camp

Lest sceptics should attribute these correspondences to coincidence, however, Stubbs takes care to note that there are systematic sound-shifts, analogous to those covered in Indo-European by Grimm's Law, which recur consistently in loans from Afro-Asiatic to Uto-Aztecan. One of these is the unvoicing of voiced stops in the more southerly receiving languages. Another is the velarization of voiced labial stops and glides in the same languages.

Stubbs' most comprehensive study lists over 200 borrowings, and he's working on a book that he says will list many times more. Say what you will about the church's shift in the way it represents the provenance of the Lamanites, but linguistically a connection can hardly be dismissed in the flippant manner you've presumed to dismiss it. By the way, what formal training do you have when it comes to ancient Semitic or Mesoamerican languages?

Doesn't matter either way. Joseph Smith's belief that the Indians were of semitic/Jewish descent was a popular assumption in his day. The huge temples in Meso-America, comparable to those only previously known in Egypt, kinda points one in that direction.

I think "heap big wampum" has its roots in "a goatskin full of shekels".

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I doubt it. The Book of Mormon won't ever be proven through archaeology linguistics or genetics. Its a faith based text. You either believe it or don't believe it.

A prof at a university in Oregon a few years back the the Zuni language has roots in ancient Japanese.