Reformed Egyptian = Latin Short Hand? Celestial version

[_Chap]

Me. I'd go for a complete 'scribes did it' cop-out, perhaps involving some awful deception in which someone stole the original transcript (which really was from the plates, in real Reformed Egyptian) and substituted something made up (using the alleged Phoenician characters as they were then thought to be) as a means of discrediting Joseph Smith in the eyes of the learned such as Anthon. We do have already have the precedent of Joseph Smith's alleged fear of a substitution by an evil-doer in the case of the 116 pages, do we not?

Somehow the link of the 'Caractors' with the plates has to be completely broken, otherwise the Book of Mormon is sunk, unless the obvious overlap between the 'Caractors' and Tironian shorthand can be magicked away somehow. But how?

[Guest]

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[_Buffalo]

It's simple, really. Marcus Tullius Tiro prayed for wisdom in creating a system of Latin shorthand, and was visited by the angel Moroni, who gave him the caractors. QED.

[_Buffalo]

Too soon to declare victory? What do you think?

[_Chap]

Thanks for keeping this alive. Apologists, have you done any research into this area? Do you have even a speculative response?

I think the problem is that we aren't intellectually serious enough to be worthy of a response.

Or the response is so blindingly obvious that the fact that we do not realize what it is without being told suffices to prove that we would be too stupid to comprehend it even if we were told.

Or everybody has to go to a very important conference.

Or everybody is working on a game-changing paper on the problem that will be published when they are damn well good and ready.

Or everybody is going to see the Bacchae in the original in company with William Schryver, who will provide a simultaneous translation into Neopolitan dialect. (Oh, how I hope they invite audience participation for the role of Pentheus, with MsJack leading off the chorus of women!!)

Or else no-one at the Maxwell Institute can as yet think of any plausible method of explaining away the fact that the 'Caractors' allegedly taken by Smith from the golden plates have a very close resemblance to what we now know to be Tironian shorthand, but which in Smith's day was thought by some to be some mysterious ancient script, possibly Phoenician.

Or we are too silly to play with, and our mother dresses us funny, so no-one cool would be seen dead with us.

Could be any or all of those.

Add to the above ... we should have been nicer to Liz, then she would have invited us to her board where at this very moment DCP is sharing an elegant and comprehensively knock-down answer to the OP with a bunch of admiring friends.

But now we shall never know ...

[Guest]

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[_Nevo]

On a serious note, I really do want to know how anyone who is a believing Mormon apologist actually reconciles this.

I am not persuaded that the so-called Anthon transcript is really Latin shorthand and Ogham code, so there is nothing to "reconcile."

People have also discovered striking resemblances between the Anthon transcript markings and

• Micmac Indian script
• Demotic Egyptian
• Mayan
• Mesoamerican cylinder seals
• Old South Arabian and Old North Arabian

(See "Out of the Dust," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 8, no. 2 [1999]: 82-83.)

Indeed, as Terryl Givens notes, the markings "have been variously described as everything from Phoenician writing to Mayan script to occult symbols, from 'a Nubian corruption of Egyptian' to secret masonic code" (Terryl L. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion [New York: Oxford University Press, 2002], 133). Thus, Richard Stout's observation of a resemblance between "nearly 60 percent" of the Anthon transcript characters and Tironian notae, a Latin shorthand found in the marginalia of some medieval Latin bibles, is not particularly surprising or noteworthy.

Stout's basic argument appears to be that the Anthon transcript characters were transcribed, not from gold plates, but from the Detroit Manuscript, a copy of a 17th-century Irish-Gaelic treatise by Geoffrey Keating that surfaced in Detroit in 1823 and included strange symbols that were probably an early modern shorthand system. That shorthand system, he believes, may have been based on Tironian notes. After all, Tironian notes were known to have been popular among Irish scribes between the 7th and 10th centuries and many early modern shorthand systems have characters resembling Tironian notes.

This is all highly speculative of course. The Detroit Manuscript is no longer extant, so we don't actually know whether its symbols were a shorthand system or whether that shorthand system derived from Tironian notes. That "the world's leading authority on Tironian notes" considered it "impossible for the Detroit Manuscript [to contain] Tironian notes" should perhaps give us pause.

Also, from a historical standpoint, I don't see how Joseph Smith could have copied characters from the Detroit Manuscript since he is not known to have been in the Detroit area between 1823 and 1828 (he did pass through the area in the mid-1830s en route to Canada). That his uncle, Stephen Mack (d. 1826), may have seen the manuscript is really neither here nor there unless we posit that Stephen Mack (for no particular reason) transcribed the characters and then sent them to his nephew, who then passed them off in 1828 as "reformed Egyptian."

[_Chap]

On a serious note, I really do want to know how anyone who is a believing Mormon apologist actually reconciles this.

I am not persuaded that the so-called Anthon transcript is really Latin shorthand and Ogham code, so there is nothing to "reconcile."

It is good to have a reply in the apologetic mode at last, and no doubt the discussion can continue in celestial fashion. But it may be a good idea just to repost this image from the OP, together with the caption in the Stout reference;

"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:"



Do you know of any claimed resemblance between the supposed Book of Mormon characters and any other known script that seems to you as close that this one? Or do you think that the characters given as Tironian are not fairly reproduced?

[Anonymous]

Do you know of any claimed resemblance between the supposed Book of Mormon characters and any other known script that seems to you as close that this one? Or do you think that the characters given as Tironian are not fairly reproduced?

Stout's side-by-side comparison looks impressive at first glance, which is why he published it. He even tested it at "several homeschool conferences" to make sure it looked sufficiently convincing. LOL.

However, a friendly critic of Stout argues here that "you could construct visual correlations between just about any non-pictographic alphabet and Tironian notae." The characters on Stout's list also resemble arabic numerals 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8, and the second figure from the top closely resembles the Hebrew letter kaph (with a dagesh). Crosses and T's and upside-down V's are also well represented.

To answer your question, yes, I do think other claimed resemblances are equally close. See, for example, Edward Ashment's comparison with Micmac hieroglyphs in his article "The Book of Mormon and the Anthon Transcript: A Preliminary Report" Sunstone 5 (1980): 30. Ariel Crowley's 1942 Improvement Era articles are also worth a look.

According to FARMS, "[Taylor] Mammen's unpublished manuscript demonstrates plausible relationships between Old South Arabian and 12 characters found on the piece of paper shown to Anthon as well as between Old North Arabian and 25 Anthon Transcript characters." I haven't seen Mammen's paper, but his source for comparison was G. Lankester Harding, An Index and Concordance of Pre-Islamic Arabian Names and Inscriptions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 6—in case anyone feels like looking that up. I'm sure those resemblances are striking too.

By the way, Kevin Barney cautions that "many scholars have long believed that the Whitmer [Anthon] transcript is actually a poorly drawn copy of the original transcript (notwithstanding the belief of the Whitmer family that it possessed the original), as it does not match the description of the transcript given by Professor Charles Anthon of Columbia University" (source). Something else to consider when comparing scripts.

[Edited to fix link]

[_Nomad]

Too soon to declare victory? What do you think?

From what I've seen here, it's never too soon for you people.

Speaking of which, I've just finished reading a partial draft of a William Schryver article about the KEP. Very interesting.