Book of Mormon

According to Daniel Ludlow, in considering the problem of the language of the plates translated by Joseph Smith it is well to keep these facts in mind:

1. the word language has several different meanings and includes both spoken and written concepts, such as grammatical constructions, thought patterns, and exact phraseology;
2. Joseph Smith translated from two different records (the small plates of Nephi and the plates of Mormon); these plates were prepared and written nearly 1,000 years apart, and the language of one well might not be the language of the other…  Thus when Nephi says “the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians” (1 Nephi 1:2), is Nephi referring to the spoken words, the written script, the grammatical constructions, the thought patterns, the exact phraseology, or what?

One scholar of the Book of Mormon [has theorized] that “Nephi wrote in the Hebrew language but used Egyptian characters or script in the same sense that a stenographer uses Greek characters to express English words” (Sidney B. Sperry, Our Book of Mormon Bookcraft, 1950, p. 31)…

If the statement by Nephi (“the language of the Egyptians”) does not give us a hint as to the actual language [or script of characters] written on the small plates of Nephi, then we are left almost completely in the dark concerning this question, as the matter is not mentioned again by Nephi or the other writers on the small plates of Nephi.  However, we are given some help as to the written script of characters of the plates of Mormon by the following statement made by Moroni about A.D. 400:

And now, behold, we have written this record according to our knowledge, in the characters which are called among us the reformed Egyptian, being handed down and altered by us, according to our manner of speech.                    

And if our plates had been sufficiently large we should have written in Hebrew; but the Hebrew hath been altered by us also; and if we could have written in Hebrew, behold, ye would have had no imperfection in our record.            

But the Lord knoweth the things which we have written, and also that none other people knoweth our language (Mormon 9:32-34).  [Daniel Ludlow, A Companion to Your Study of the Book of Mormon, p. 88]        

Most people associate Egyptian writing with hieroglyphics, but does the wording “language of the Egyptians” imply that the small plates were written in Egyptian hieroglyphic characters?  Furthermore, what constituted the “reformed Egyptian” characters that Moroni talks about in Mormon 9:32-34?       

Hugh Nibley comments that in matters of language and composition the Book of Mormon, from the first, presented a welcome target to the critics: here was something that even a child could see was fraudulent, something that no intelligent person, let alone a clever deceiver would dream of ? “From the reformed Egyptian!!!” screamed Alexander Campbell, with three exclamation points.  Nobody knew anything about reformed Egyptian then…  [but] “Reformed Egyptian” is as good of term as any to describe that peculiar and remarkably abbreviated style of “cursive writing [that] developed out of the Hieratic by systematic abbreviation from the eighth to the fourth centuries,” which enjoyed the heyday of its international popularity in Lehi’s own time. [Hugh Nibley, Since Cumorah, F.A.R.M.S., p. 149] 

Thus, we could call the style of the written characters of the small plates “reformed Egyptian,” but that style was probably not exactly like the “reformed Egyptian” of Mormon and Moroni’s time because according to Moroni, as it was handed down, “it was altered by us according to our manner of speech” (Mormon 9:32).  [Alan C. Miner, personal notes]

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