I'm not sure if we're just not communicating properly, or if we're dealing with someone who does not know what an actual comparison of languages looks like, but either way it's kind of bugging me (sorry). Perhaps I should do one here, so that we all know what is being expected when a person says "I think language X is comparable to language Y in this way".
I can't do a comparison between Ancient Egyptian and Hebrew, since I can't read either, but I can do Coptic and Arabic, which might be just as illuminating (seeing as how Coptic is a form of Egyptian, and Arabic -- like Hebrew -- is a Semitic language). For He Is The Way's and others' benefit, this is what a very simple comparison between the two might look like.
Coptic (from Reintges, C. "Code-mixing Strategies in Coptic Egyptian", p. 195,
LingAeg 9 [2001], 193-237):
nhenrefrouoein
n-hen-ref-r-woein
DO.marker-indef
plural-nompfx-make(CS)-light
'light-bringers'
This word was excised from a longer sentence "God, the creator, has provided us with the 'light-bringers' for the eyes of both our soul and our body." The direct object (DO) marker attaches to
what was provided (the light-bringers); the indefinite article (plural form, since it's "bringers") is an indefinite article (Coptic loooooves articles); the nominalizing prefix takes a verb ('make') and turns it into a noun ('maker', or in the case of this translation, 'bringer'); 'make' is in the construct state (CS), which means that it is the first element of a genitive phrase (an 'of' phrase, e.g., 'makers/bringers of light'); and finally, the noun 'light' is present at the very end of the string.
Coptic Egyptian is a very synthetic, left-branching language, meaning that the element of a phrase that determines what type of phrase it is (in this case, a noun phrase, as 'light-bringers' is a plural noun) occurs in the phrase-final position, on the far right, with everything else 'branching' from it to the left: the object marker(s), the article(s), etc. Synthetic just means that it has a high morpheme-per-word, morphemes being the smallest pieces of language that carry grammatical meaning, like "dogs" has the noun "dog" + the plural morpheme -s. You can see from the example that the Coptic word has many morphemes. The opposite tendency in language, where a language has a low morpheme-to-word ratio, is called analytic (analytic languages), and as you can imagine, this aspect of language occurs on a kind of scale, with some languages being more analytic or more synthetic (they’re not absolute terms).
Arabic:
جالب الضوء
galeb el-daw'
collector def.-light
'light bringer'
Here is roughly the equivalent noun in Arabic. It is actually a noun phrase in the genitive construction (again, an 'of' phrase, i.e., 'bringer of light'), which is expressed syntactically in Arabic, with the first element being non-defined (not carrying the definite article el-) and placed directly next to a defined element: malik el-salam 'king of peace', kitab el-muqaddis 'book of holiness' ( = Holy Bible), etc. X def.-X = X of X.
I suppose if our friend He Is the Way meant that Egyptian is "more condensed" by virtue of having more morphemes per word (more synthetic/less analytic) than Hebrew, then that would be correct, but I doubt that this is what he meant or could have meant for a few reasons:
(1) At least some of those Coptic morphemes (e.g., the direct object marker) are there to keep track of the word's role within the larger sentence from which it was excised, so they're not (strictly speaking) necessary for the word to be properly formed, only to be properly placed within that particular sentence. It's something akin to saying that English is "more condensed" by virtue of "her" expressing not only gender (feminine), but also person (3rd person), and subject/object role (object). That's a lot of things to express via one simple pronoun, right? Right...except that these are simply properties of the pronoun itself. They don’t make English more synthetic (have more morphemes), as there is no way to further break down the word ‘her’ in a manner similar to what has already been done with the Coptic word. So it comes down to a question of what is meant by “condensed”: Is a word that has a lot of morphemes in it ‘more condensed’ by virtue of expressing a lot of information in one word, when other types of languages (more analytic languages/languages with fewer morphemes per word) can also express a lot of information per word without needing to add a bunch of prefixes, suffixes, or other markers to it? Looked at from that perspective, the word with all the “other stuff” attached to its root noun, as in Coptic, doesn’t really look more condensed, does it? It looks much larger/less condensed/more bloated. So it's a matter of how you analyze it.
(2) What I have shown above is true about the Coptic stage of Egyptian in particular, meaning that it is an accurate representation of how Coptic in particular forms words. The thing is that from what little I know about other stages of Egyptian, this is not true at all stages. To quote Brown & Ogilvie (Eds.)
Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World (Elsevier 2009), “A similar complete cycle can be seen in Egyptian, where Old Egyptian was synthetic, Middle and Late Egyptian analytic, and Coptic, its descendant, again synthetic (Hintze, 1947; Hodge, 1970).” (292) If we keep this in mind when evaluating Mormon claims regarding who was writing what when, then we see that it could have only worked if the Jews in question were writing Old Egyptian (the ancient form of the language written in hieroglyphs). This certainly matches up with what our friend He Is the Way has been posting, but it very much doesn’t match up with the actual historical record of Egyptian language use among the Jews of that country, as I’ve already shown in bringing attention to the Elephantine papyri. The Elephantine papyri actually stretch back long enough to coincide with the Mormon timeline to some degree (the earliest of them date to the 5th century BC, whereas “Reformed Egyptian” is hypothesized to have existed possibly as early in the 4th century BC), and yet at no point in this collection, to the extent that Egyptian is used at all (again, the papyri are mostly written in Aramaic, not Egyptian) do we see the use of Ancient Egyptian. It’s simply not there. And this is the most complete collection we have of Jewish-related writings from the time period. Obviously by the time we get to the Coptic period (which can be very generously dated to the 2nd century AD, as this is when the earliest bilingual Coptic-Greek gospel fragments begin appearing, though some argue for an earlier or later date), it is far too late to be talking about that (read: Coptic is very clearly written in Greek characters, which cannot be confused for hieroglyphs, and furthermore represents a later stage of the Egyptian language than was written in the other writing systems), and yet that is the next stage of Egyptian which would have been synthetic, i.e. “more condensed” by what I am assuming – according to the most charitable understanding I can muster – would be He Is the Way’s way of putting it.
All of this is a very, very long way of saying that it just doesn’t work at all. There is no evidence in any kind of Egyptian for anything that the Mormons claim about their book or its provenance.
