OK, this will freak you out. What if Nephi really wrote aboth “fathers” and really meant his male ancestors in a tribal sense, his progenitors of the tribe of Manasseh? And what if Joseph, in translating that into English was influenced by his own culture to render “parents” in a nuclear family sense?

That’s enough to blow your mind.

No, it makes sense; that was my first impression too when reading the facts in your article. The term “fathers” would be a literal translation but not convey the Nephi’s reason for why he was educated. “Ancestors” is closer to the mark, but again, doesn’t communicate the idea of the whole sentence to the reader of Joseph Smith’s time.

What I think that your analysis is missing is that “goodly” in the language of Joseph Smith’s day, meant prosperous, didn’t it?

I think I can easily envision a scenario where the spoken language has evolved greatly — beyond the capability to easily express it using the archaic script they’re using on their permanent (metallic) records.

And I don’t dispute that Mormon and Moroni obviously were at least familiar enough with Hebrew to recognize that it would have lent itself better to recording the kinds of things they were writing about. Moroni also laments his inability to write like the brother of Jared, who obviously would not have written in either Egyptian or Hebrew. I guess the bottom line is that I don’t read too much into what Moroni says about “if we could have written in Hebrew …” To me, it says nothing more than that Moroni was a multi-linguist who had a certain personal affinity for Hebrew. And this single reference to Hebrew in the entire book is simply not enough, in my estimation, to override the Egyptian predominance in every other reference to the language of the Nephites.

As for Joseph’s translation process, I have to admit that I’m a convert to the Skousen “tight control” theories. I don’t think Joseph Smith was given anything more than just the plain English translation that appears in the first edition of the BoM. I certainly don’t believe that there was any “language” revealed to Joseph, and I don’t have any reason to believe that the language of Mormon was “Hebrew-based.” At least, I don’t know how someone could justify such a conclusion.

Is it not conceivable that, in light of the “facts” as we understand them regarding Joseph’s translation process (revealed through the seer stone, rather than decoded), that the language was revealed to him as Mormon’s native language, which was Hebrew based? Mormon laments in several places how insufficient and cumbersome the reformed Egyptian is in expressing his ideas. Perhaps to make up for this fact the book was revealed as he would have expressed it verbally. Just a thought.

You’re referring to the story of Sami Hanna. But your details on the story are largely inaccurate. You might want to check out this article:

http://en.fairmormon.org/Sami_Hanna_on_the_Book_of_Mormon

We, of course, have all the references in the OT. And those are good because they definitely show that there was an Egyptian orientation among those who would have been inclined to flee. And, if we assume that the plates of brass originated with Joseph in Egypt and were passed down through his lineage, and were greatly valued by their possessors, it is logical that they would have viewed a refuge in Egypt as a means by which the plates could be protected.

Of course, the question becomes: why would Israelites maintain, with great difficulty, a record of their scriptures, written in Egyptian, and inscribed on metallic plates? I think there are logical reasons why this would be. Of course, Ephraim and Manasseh would have both been native Egyptian speakers. And, it could be logically concluded, their descendants for many, many generations would have been native Egyptian speakers — at least until the Exodus. Indeed, after 400 years living in Egypt, who among the Israelites would not have been an Egyptian speaker? Probably very few, if any. The real question is how long it would have taken before Hebrew (and/or its variants) became the lingua franca in the “Promised Land?” Even in Israel today, there is great difficulty in getting new immigrants to quickly acquire Hebrew proficiency. It takes multiple generations.

I can also easily envision a scenario where the keepers of the plates of brass would have felt a certain scholarly snobbery about their fluency in the ancient Egyptian script of the plates. They many have regarded the language as inherently superior to the Hebrew-esque dialects being spoken by the masses, and therefore have proudly recorded their scriptures in it much as Medieval monks methodically maintained the Bible in Latin.

In any case, it is my opinion that the Book of Mormon is all but explicit in telling us that the language of Lehi’s fathers was Egyptian. This seems to presuppose that they actually lived in Egypt. And knowing, as we do, that there were many northern Kingdom refugees in Egypt for at least a few generations before Lehi, it then becomes logical to connect the dots and accept the possibility that Lehi was an Israelite born in Egypt, undoubtedly to parents also born in Egypt. And while they undoubtedly retained their religion and cultural identity (“the learning of the Jews”), they would have been Egyptian both in language and residence, much like modern Jews in the diaspora.