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So let's not forget that just because something seems bizarre or absurd doesn't mean that it isn't.
Doesn't mean that it isn't
bizarre or absurd?
Yeah, man. Totally.
I'm going to assume you mean something like "doesn't mean that it isn't possible", which again requires reminding Mormons why it is that sciences like linguistics do not function based on the 'possible' (since if we're using the basically non-existent standard of "you can't prove it
didn't happen", as HITW put forth, that would include literally anything anyone could dream up for which there is not [enough] countering evidence), but on the demonstrable and probable -- and at the level of actually defending and publishing research, what is reproducible and falsifiable.
What is demonstrable points us to what is probable. For instance, taking an overly charitable view of the point that HITW seemed to be trying to make, can we say that the existence of English-based creoles makes it probable that we may find other types of creoles in other parts of the world? Yes, as it is highly unlikely that this phenomenon should only be present when English comes into contact with other languages. And indeed that is what we do find: There are Portuguese-based creoles like Papiamentu (spoken on the islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao), Arabic-based creoles like Nubi (spoken in Uganda and Kenya), and even a Uyghur-based creole called Hezhou, spoken in certain areas of China.
But when the question is narrowed from "Do we find this in many languages?" to "Have there ever been any
Egyptian-based creole(s)?", the answer is no, there have not been, and the existence of other types of creoles don't really matter, since there's nothing that says because they exist, this other thing that is in the same category that we have no
evidence of the existence of must therefore exist or have existed.
To see why this is, first we must consider how it is that creoles are hypothesized to come into existence: long-term, sustained contact between two languages causing a sort of incomplete shift whereby one of the two absorbs much of the vocabulary of the other while retaining its own underlying grammatical structures. Hence, a language like Hezhou has mainly Mandarin Chinese vocabulary, but placed into a Turkic (Uyghur) grammatical system, with six noun cases (whereas Mandarin marks what we would call 'case' -- e.g., dative, accusative, etc. -- by means other than via noun form, like word order, free and bound 'relator nouns', etc.; see
Starosta and colleague 1985), an SOV word order (whereas Mandarin is
typically SVO), and
agglutinative morphology (compared to Mandarin's very analytic,
isolating morphology).
So we would have to see some time period in which the speakers of what would become 'Reformed Egyptian' came into contact with the speakers of another language and it resulted in a similarly mixed language form, with this other language and some form of Egyptian coming to 'rest' (i.e., being standardized and learned by subsequent generations as a native language, which is the difference between a creole and a pidgin) bearing this kind of relation. Since the 'Egyptian' part suggests contact with Egyptian/Egyptian language (duh), and the BOM talks about very small, discrete populations coming from Jerusalem or its environs, it would make more sense to assume that the speakers of the other language would relexify (provide the 'donor' vocabulary) Egyptian, rather than the other way around, as this is exactly what happened with the advent of Coptic: a form of
Egyptian language with a huge amount of Greek
vocabulary, rather than the other way around. (There was a form of Greek spoken in Egypt, but since the Greek-speakers were the political elite around Alexandria and the other major cities since at least the days of the Ptolemies, it was the Egyptians who learned the Greek language, not the other way around.)
Soooo...where is it? Where is this resulting language that is Egyptian at its base with all this 'foreign' vocabulary replacing the 'native' vocabulary? Really, I just gave you the answer, as far as what we have any evidence for: it is
Coptic, and indeed some very respectable researchers in the field of Egyptian and Coptic linguistics like Dutch linguist Chris Reintges (author of a Sahidic learner's grammar in 2004 and many articles covering Coptic Egyptian's morphological peculiarities, as well as other forms of Egyptian) do essentially argue that Coptic represents a kind of 'mixed language' without necessarily using the word 'creole' to describe it (I'd have to go back over some of his work I cited in my own work, but I don't recall seeing it there), with one Egyptian and one Greek 'parent'.
Having written all this, I remind you here that this is Coptic:
We can read this. Heck, any Coptic person who is literate enough can read it (not just linguists or other nerds). It is the Lord's prayer in the Bohairic dialect. It's printed in literally all of our service books.
For contrast, this is supposedly a sample of the 'Reformed Egyptian' writing that Mormons think golden plates found by JS were written in (taken from Wikipedia's page on the
Anthon Transcript):
It's not readable by anyone, as far as anyone can tell it doesn't say anything, and it's not found anywhere outside of this paper. To quote Egyptologist John A. Wilson (ibid), "This is not Egyptian writing, as known to the Egyptologist. It obviously is not hieroglyphic, nor the 'cursive hieroglyphic' as used in the
Book of the Dead. It is not Coptic, which took over Greek characters to write Egyptian. Nor does it belong to one of the cursive stages of ancient Egyptian writing: hieratic, abnormal hieratic, or demotic."
In short, it is nothing. It's not evidence of anything. And this is literally one of the only pieces of physical evidence we have that is actually analyzable by anyone, and whenever that happens (and they're a professional who is not in the pocket of the LDS in one way or another), they come to that same conclusion.