On Joseph Smith Being Right About "mon" Meaning Good, And The Egyptian Alphabet

I recently set out to test a potentially significant hypothesis, as introduced in my last post. Preliminary results are looking good for the hypothesis.

However, it looks like my last post was not easy for people to understand. 

To help orient the reader, I would like to provide a quick bit of background on the documents in question, and explain Joseph Smith being correct about the word "mon" as an example of how I think the documents work. 

For those who aren't familiar with the situation, Joseph Smith and his scribes created some Egyptian Alphabet documents but left us with no explanation as to what exactly they were. Scholars have dismissed the contents of these documents in the past as made-up words with no real meaning, and some scholars have pointed to them to claim Joseph Smith was a fraud. 

One of the documents is in Joseph Smith's handwriting, and may be the only one he was directly involved with. W.W. Phelps was very interested in languages and may have tried to extrapolate more than what Joseph Smith had told him.  

For a while, I have suspected the characters in the Egyptian documents are logograms, perhaps of Reformed Egyptian, and that the descriptions accompanying the characters constitute a list of connotations which the Nephites or someone else attached to those characters. 

This idea came to me while I was researching Joseph Smith's famous letter (penned by W.W. Phelps) which claims the word "Mormon" means "more good," if seen as a modern contraction between the English word "more" and the Egyptian word "mon," meaning "good." The letter places the Egyptian in the context of Nephite usage. So, I thought to myself, what if the Egyptian word "mon" (mn) has a meaning which the Nephites took and then added additional connotations to, so that when we see the literal meaning of the Egyptian word showing up in the Book of Mormon, it is accompanied by specific added connotations which match Joseph Smith's claim? 

In Egyptian, "mn" means to remain, endure, to be set in place, etc. (used in the word for monument, for example). 

This means we can potentially test Joseph Smith's claim. And when we do, it looks very good for Joseph Smith.

Because we know what "mn" means in Egyptian, we can find, within the text of the Book of Mormon, words which, on their face, match the Egyptian meaning of "mn." From there, we can identify the connotations Nephites attached to those words. 

Mosiah 5:15 equates being "steadfast and immovable" with "always abounding in good works." There we go. "steadfast and immovable" matches the literal definition of "mn," and the Nephites add to it connotations of "good." Paul also made this connection (in Greek), so the conceptual origin may have been in the Ancient Near East, before the Lehites left Jerusalem.  

Since "steadfast and immoveable" captures the meaning of the Egyptian "mn" (which is represented by the senet board hieroglyph), we can picture a Nephite Alphabet showing the senet board hieroglyph (or a modified version of it) accompanied by the description: "always abounding in good works." 

And thus Joseph Smith is vindicated. We can verify this by the fact that if we wanted to translate the Book of Mormon into ancient Egyptian, we could even use "mn" in Mosiah 5:15, using its actual Egyptological meaning, and it would also mean good. Joseph Smith had no personal way of knowing that, but it's a bullseye. 

So, that's how I suspect the alphabet works. The problem I've faced is that I hadn't accounted for the "names" which accompany the characters in Joseph Smith's Egyptian Alphabet. They seem mostly like strange made-up words. 

Here's where my new hypothesis comes in. I think it might be a phonetic alphabet, which references other languages. In some cases it has name for letters (like Iota and Tau), and in other cases it sounds them out or represents a foreign letter with a letter in the English alphabet.

For reasons stated in my previous post, I decided to use Greek to gloss out the letters and their meanings. 

I don't know Greek. And I don't think Greek is the only language involved here. And ancient Greek is not fully understood by scholars. But I'm just trying to see if some plausible results show up. Because then we could start looking into other languages and do a deep dive into the theory. 

I am using Google Translate, and it has been returning relevant, specific results which align with the descriptions in Joseph Smith's Egyptian Alphabet. 

The results are not likely to be found in a Greek dictionary, but that's irrelevant. Google Translate is casting a wide enough net to capture glosses (compensating for Joseph Smith's imperfect renderings) and return non-random matches. 

Of course, word association can lead to false positives. But random combinations of Greek letters rarely bring any results, let alone directly relevant results. Joseph Smith fares far better than random letter combinations.

When more than one Greek letter seems a plausible match for Joseph Smith's phonetic alphabet, I try each of them out. But that does not mean I could just keep trying until I got what I wanted. The key here is how rare it is for Google Translate to return any translated result. It is not as though it gives me lists of words to choose from.

I'm probably already confusing everyone, so let me show a really short example. 

Walkthrough: 

First, we look at an entry in the Egyptian Alphabet (the Alphabet document in Joseph Smith's own handwriting):

We can see that the entry has a character in the column on the left. Then it has the strange word, "Zi." Then it says, "Virgin unmarried or the principle of virtue." 

This brings to mind Mark 5:30: "And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone out of him, turned him about in the press, and said, Who touched my clothes?" 

What does it mean that virtue had gone out of him? And that His virtue, in turn, healed the woman who touched his clothes? There is certainly an important principle here, the principle of virtue. A special healing power. 

Second, let's take a closer look at the strange word, "Zi."

We see two letters there. What if the Z stands for the Greek letter zeta, and the i stands for the Greek letter eta? If we combine the two letters, could that maybe spell something meaningful, according to Google Translate's net that it casts out?

Sure enough, we come back with an interesting result:

She lives. That sounds like the principle of virtue we were just discussing. What are the odds that it would come back with something relevant like that? It could have said anything, or most likely not given any translation at all, if it were random. 

Are you starting to get the idea of how this works?

Okay, now let's jump to something more advanced. The last, and probably most important entry in the Alphabet document is Ah-bra-oam. "The father of many nations, a prince of peace, one who keeps the commandments of God, a patriarch, a rightful heir, a high priest." 

The whole description is about works. So would it surprise you that when I rendered it into Greek and entered it into Google Translate it gave the word "Works?" 

Very interesting evidence.

Next, a lot of the entries involve the word "Beth." Let's look at Beth. 

The Alphabet says: "Beth mans first residence frui[t]ful garden A great valy a place of hapiness 1 times"

Sounds like the Garden of Eden, right? The Garden of Eden had set boundaries and rules, it was a district. What if I told you that Google Translate returned the word "district" when I rendered Beth to Greek and entered it? 

Webster's 1828 dictionary says this about the word "district": "Properly, a limited extent of country; a circuit within which power, right or authority may be exercised, and to which it is restrained; a word applicable to any portion of land or country, or to any part of a city or town, which is defined by law or agreement."

Consider those words: "a limited extent of country ... within which power, right or authority may be exercised, and to which it is restrained..." The word "district" directly describes the Garden of Eden. 

Now, after having read this post, you can go back and read the previous post and hopefully get more out of it. 

One final note for now. The Egyptian Alphabet entries are inter-connected in a way I haven't figured out yet. 

There is a theme of being underwater ("beneath or under water," "the land of Egypt first seen under <​water​>") in the Alphabet document, and some of the Beth translation results are very in line with that theme. 

There is "abyss," "deep," dive," "dry," and even "submarine" which literally means underwater. The fact that these are established themes within BOTH the document and the translation results indicates a level of convergence that really defies coincidence.