I can't believe this "Reformed Egyptian" stupidity continues on unabated, as though we have not discussed it probably hundreds of times. Talking to Mormons about stuff that is
definitively known through the historical record, like what forms of Egyptian
actually existed and where and when, is like talking to a wall. A very stubborn wall.
But for the benefit of those who will learn, let's look at the BOM timeline. This is from the LDS website, so there's no accusing me of being "anti-Mormon" for pointing out how it just doesn't work:
As you can see, it is said to start in earnest in 600 BC, and end c. 420 AD. What forms of Egyptian were used during this time?
Written Egyptian emerged during the historical period of the "Old Kingdom", roughly 2800-2150 BC (Lopriento 1997:436), with its earliest identifiable complete sentence dated to approximately 2690 BC (Allen 2013:2), meaning it emerged rather early in this period. This kind of Egyptian is sometimes called "Old Egyptian", "Early Egyptian", or "Ancient Egyptian", depending on the discipline, but it is not quite of the type you would associate with the hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptian monuments like the temples and pyramids, as it had yet to develop into a fully-fledged writing system (it was not regularized, not all the characters used in hieroglyphic writing were present, etc). Most of the images we see of hieroglyphic writing in popular books and films are more likely to date from the Middle Egyptian period, starting at about 2000 BC (recall that the Ebers papyrus from my other post was dated to 1550 BC, so it within this period), as it is during the Middle Egyptian period that the production of texts and monuments really increased, as the system was regularized and the character set exhibited by this stage of the language (~ 700 total characters) stayed basically the same until the advent of the Coptic alphabet in the early Christian centuries (or perhaps pre-Christian; there is some debate on this) in Egypt. The Middle Egyptian period was also when the Hieratic cursive script developed, which would form the basis of the Demotic (popular) writing of Late Egyptian during the Ptolemaic period, beginning around the 14th century BC. Both Middle Egyptian and Late Egyptian survived in some form into the Christian period, with the last known inscription in the Demotic script dating to 452 AD (notably long after the order to close the pagan temples was given by the emperor Theodosius in the 380s).
While there is some debate as to when Coptic became established as the language of Christian Egypt, pretty much every source I've consulted agrees that it is in place by the 4th century AD. Coptic survived into the Medieval period, probably dying out as a spoken language in around the 14th century AD (reports of an 18th century traveler from Europe meeting people who spoke the language fluently cannot be corroborated, and one guy's personal travel log doesn't really mean anything anyway), but surviving for a few more centuries as a written language, if only for translation purposes (there are actually Coptic-Ge'ez grammars from if I recall correctly around the 17th century, showing that it was still profitable for the Ethiopians to learn the language, since many of their texts were translated from what they had received from Egypt during the Coptic period; they never spoke it themselves, however).
With that short summary, we have covered a period extending well before the beginning of the BOM history and well past its end, and across all that time we can tell what was spoken and written. Nowhere in any of it do we find any 'Reformed Egyptian', and the protestation of the ignorant that "We are reading a Reformed Egyptian (a short hand Egyptian) reformed over a thousand years of time in a completely foreign country, far far away from Egypt" is not possible to take as a defense, because that is simply not how languages work.
I know I've made this comparison before, but if we want to look at a language with an even greater time of separation from its original setting, in a new country surrounded by speakers of other languages (etc., etc., so as to best match Peter's feeble defense), we can look at Cypriot Maronite Arabic. CMA evolved from the Arabic dialects spoken by waves of Maronites immigrating from their traditional homeland in Lebanon and Syria to Cyprus to escape the Muslim invasions of their land in the 7th century, an immigration that lasted up until the 13th century (Versteegh 2011:536-537). As it still exists today (barely; it is reported that all speakers are over the age of 30, and none of the 3,656 people who registered as "Maronites" in the 2011 Cypriot census reported it as their first language), we can say without exaggeration that it is a language that is the product of some ~1,380 years of isolation from its motherland and parent language/dialects (the Muslim conquest of the Levant having taken place 634-638, so 1,385 to 1,381 years ago). 1,380 years is considerably longer than the entire span of the BOM timeline as presented in the above graphic, which is only 1,020 years (600 BC to 420 AD).
So in that time, do we see CMA develop from a mix of Levantine/Eastern Arabic dialects into something completely unintelligible and unrecognizable relative to what its speakers started out with as their phonological and syntactic base(s), in manner similar to how the "Egyptian Grammar" found at the Joseph Smith Papers Project is full of nonsense that is transparently gibberish like "Toan low ee tahee takee toues" and "Enish-go-an=dosh"?
Let's see. Full disclosure: I don't know Levantine Arabic (I was taught Modern Standard Arabic, which is kind of like "newscaster speech" which nobody speaks natively, and have since then only spent large amounts of time around Egyptians, whose dialects are quite different than what is spoken in Lebanon/Syria/Jordan or Iraq), so I'll have to do a comparison with MSA instead.
From the wiki page on CMA, we have the example sentence of:
I ate bread with olives, some honey and drank some cow's milk
In CMA, which has been surrounded by Greek speakers for 1,000+ years, it is
Kilt xops ma zaytun, xaytċ casel u şraft xlip tel pakra
(notes: the C with the dot over it is like the "ch" sound in "church", while the s with the tail is like the "sh" sound in "shop"; x is like the "ch" sound in the German pronunciation of "Bach", or the Scottish "Loch"; c by itself is a sound that we don't have in English or most other European languages called a voiced pharyngeal fricative or voiced pharyngeal approximant; you can
listen to it here, if you want to...I will keep to these conventions when writing out the Modern Standard Arabic equivalent below.)
In MSA (simplified with case endings removed, since this is not a lesson in Arabic grammar), it would be something like (I put it through Google Translate so that you can all put that English sentence into the same program and see that I'm not making it up, though I did modify the transliteration to get rid of some of the 'dummy' vowels that it places between consonants and keep the transliteration as used in the CMA sentence):
أكلت الخبز بالزيتون وبعض العسل وشربت حليب البقر
akalat alxubz bilzaytun wa bacḍ alcasl wa şrubt ḥalib albaqar
Here are all the cognates (words with the same origin) in the sentence, with their MSA forms on the right, and their CMA forms on the left:
Kilt = Akalat
xops = xubz
casel = casl
u = wa
şraft = şrubt
xlip = ḥalib
tel pakra = albaqar
Do you notice something? This is every word except for
xaytċ (CMA) vs.
bacḍ (MSA), which for all I know could reflect some specific Syro-Lebanese vocabulary (perhaps inherited from Syriac?) that I don't know.
Still, the point is clear, is it not?
1,380 years of separation -- geographically, culturally, and linguistically -- from their homeland and the languages they used at the start of their communities in the new land of Cyprus, and what they have developed from the parent language is very far from unintelligible gibberish (though it is true that CMA is
not intelligible to mainland Arabic speakers, it is clearly still
a form of Arabic; it has not evolved into something else that would not be recognizable as Arabic, as you can clearly see here). It has regular correspondences, like p in CMA for b in MSA (standard varieties of Arabic do not have "p" unless they are in close contact with languages that have it, like Iraqi Arabic which is in close contact with Kurdish and Assyrian, and also borrowed a lot from Turkish during the Ottoman times; Kurdish, Eastern Assyrian, and Turkish all have "p"), and predictable changes, e.g., the definite article "al" in MSA is dropped in CMA, except for in
tel pakra, which I suspect it has retained as part of the fixed grammatical construction for genitive clauses, i.e., "milk of the cow"; Maltese, another Arabic descendant that has actually evolved into its own separate language under the heavy influence of Italian, does this: spirtu ta' aħwa "spirit of brotherhood", cf. MSA بروح الاخاء bi-ruḥi al-ixa';
spirtu is obviously an Italian/Romance loanword, but
ta' aħwa is their equivalent of the Arabic
al-ixa'.
No "eee ma moh hee ha hoh wee woh" or whatever for the Cypriot Maronites, despite over a thousand years of isolation on an island where everyone around them was speaking Greek (which is not genetically related to Arabic).
To our Mormon readers and friends:
I don't make long posts like this explaining patiently why your defenses are not acceptable so that you can reply "WELL, BUT WE DON'T
KNOWWWW FOR SUUUURE" or "THAT'S JUST, LIKE,
YOUR OPINION, MAN", so if that's all you have to say, save it for the next stake meeting, because I don't want to see it, and frankly it's just really freaking embarrassing. Just don't bother. I am qualified to give these simple, hopefully clear explanations that show how actually existing languages evolve. There are no exceptions to this, because anything that would have evolved in such a short time (and yes, given that Egyptian was first written down over 4,000 years ago, ~1,400 years
is a short time) to not resemble its claimed parent can rightly be said to have its true parentage elsewhere. It's the same with all kinds of evolution: modern housecats did not evolve from some animal transparently unrelated to the felidae family in the biological blink of an eye. Their ancestors are much more easily traceable to earlier felidae or felidae-type ancestors than they are to eagles, or lizards, or whatever. You cannot presuppose drastic changes without extremely compelling evidence, and the BOM is not only not at that level, it is not any level of evidence.
And that really is the bottom line. It is long past time for all who believe in the BOM and its narrative to stop abusing a perfectly fine science like linguistics (not to mention all the other sciences its partisans abuse in an attempt to root their religious text in the real world) by proposing things that are absolutely ludicrous and contrary to the way that literally every other language that has ever actually existed has evolved. There is absolutely no shame in deciding to embrace the more honest alternative and say something like "Yes, there is no real evidence for this, but I believe in it because I believe in my religion, and this is what my religion tells me happened. Maybe we'll find evidence for it some day, but we haven't yet, and that's okay. I still believe." That is fine and honorable. It is not honorable, believable, or even really tolerable (to someone who actually knows linguistics, anyway) to have to put up with the kinds of defenses that Mormons usually choose to attempt to forward instead of doing this, which frankly make the Mormon religion far less believable than anything any 'anti-Mormon' source or person could say.
That is seriously the nicest way I can think to put that. Please, as a linguist and as someone who does not like to see Mormons humiliated (because even if I disagree with you, you are still fellow people created by God, and also I am well aware that there is not scientific evidence for all of the beliefs of traditional Christianity, either; God doesn't really like to come into the lab for interviews and testing, y'know?), I am really trying to get you all to understand what an incredible disservice you are doing to your own effort to bolster your religion by grasping at pseudo-scientific straws when that is not necessary or helpful. If you love your God and your religion, stop doing that.