Notes on Joseph Smith’s Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language

With syllabic correlation of hieroglyphic and cuneiform characters

(c) 2007 David Grant Stewart, Sr.

An attempt at reverse engineering the Book of Abraham from the JS GAEL, adding my own notes.

Work in progress

1.      Edit the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language.

2.      Determine the foundation meaning of each syllable.

3.      Match to the extent possible, the signs and sounds with Egyptian Hieroglyphic.

4.      Match to the extent possible, the signs and sounds with Sumerian Cuneiform.

5.      Match to the extent possible, the signs and sounds with Egyptian Hieratic.

6.      Translate all other documents based upon these findings.

Observations:

1. The Book of Abraham was written in the language of Adam.

2. The language of Adam used four writing systems, i.e. hieratic, hieroglyphic, cuneiform, and Phoenician characters.

3. The language of Adam was monosyllabic.

4. Every character had up to five syllables.

5. A character in combination had only one syllable.

The very first thing the JS GAEL tells us is that every character may have from one to five degrees. These degrees, usually preserving the same sound, each has a set of meanings.

The second thing we are told is that the subject must be continued until as many parts of speech - verbs, participles, conjunctions, and adverbs - are used as there are connecting points in a given character. This seems to be roughly equivalent to the Chinese strike count in a character wherein each stroke has independent meaning.

Early Egyptian Hieratic characters were actually a set of characters themselves, just as Chinese characters are formed of strokes and radicals but again with the proviso that each stroke has its own independent meaning or meanings.

For example, the character i which is said to stand for o in later Egyptian, was originally composed of three characters, the dot ., the vertical line |, and the slanted line /, each of which had a set of sounds and meanings .

The line multiplication system later used by the Romans and Chinese is explained: a line over a character raises it by one degree or five times; a line under it lowers it to the next lower degree. We use the underline in the opposite sense, to emphasize what is underlined.

Here I will make a little chart to illustrate how a composite character is dissected and translated:

The next thing we notice in the JS GAEL is that a character has a different sound when compounded, i.e. connected, than it has when it stands alone. So the dot . has the sound IOTA when it stands alone but KI when it is connected. This change of sound does not affect the meaning.

This sound mutation is the same thing we see in both Sumerian cuneiform and in Chinese.  Nobody has ever been able to understand the GAEL [if he had, he would have used it to retranslate all the old Hieratic documents into their full meaning, which has never been done,] ; it is precisely by making these comparisons that it becomes comprehensible. For example, the Sumerian cuneiform character i is pronounced I {EE] and means “hand” and a lot of other things. The character / is pronounced ANA and DISH, TISH, TIS, and THIS. But  D is pronounced AD, ATH, AT. This is easier to understand and remember if you know that i can actually stand for any vowel, but the default is I, and that D, TH, and T are all the same sound in Sumerian, which you probably already surmised. Then all you have to wonder is where the IS or ISH went. This is a gentle example. We’ll see some more that are seemingly inscrutable.

The ancient hieratic characters were each custom constructed [hence no font!] as Chinese characters also were in the beginning. Here’s how it starts:

CHAL SID OAN HI ASH ZA KI OAN HI ASH KI AH BRAH OAM

CHAL SID = Chaldee

OAN HI ASH = in the land

ZA KI OAN HI ASH = at the residence of my [KI] fathers

KI = I

AH BRAH OAM = Abraham - but this in turn expands into an iterative description [e.g. AH = father, BRAH = great or many, OAM = nation or nations; AH = possessor, BRAH = great,  OAM = knowledge - here the O sound of AYIN is preserved as GN so it should really be read GNAM] and so on.

All of the previous paragraph is only a partial translation of a single character, so you can see that a tremendous amount of information is lost when Egyptologists translate the character as if it were only a small part of one word!