In the second verse of the Book of Mormon, Nephi claims that he was engraving on gold plates “a record of my father, which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians.”
Ever since this verse appeared in the first verses of the Book of Mormon, critics of the Church, and particularly of Joseph Smith and the book he translated, have been laughing themselves silly.
For those with a knowledge of linguistics and who have studied the lifetime work of linguistic scholar Brian Stubbs of Blanding, Utah, aren’t laughing so loudly anymore. For three decades Stubbs has been making a comparative analysis of ancient Semitic languages of the Middle East, particularly Egyptian, Aramaic and Hebrew and their relationship to 30 different languages in the Uto-Aztecan language group spoken by Native Americans in the American Southwest, (the U.S. and Mexico) and has discovered some amazing similarities. Specifically, his findings in two books conclude that 40 percent pf the vocabulary of these Native American languages can be attributed to having Semitic roots. By comparison, Yiddish, a Germanic dialect spoken by Ashakanazi Jews in Eastern Europe only contains 15 percent of its vocabulary from Hebrew!
In this podcast of Latter Day Radio that was first broadcast on KLO 1430am in Salt Lake City in 2018, Stubbs details his work and concludes that statistically speaking, these American Indian tribes got their language from the Middle East, substantiating Joseph Smith’s claim. Listen and you decide.
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