Reformed Egyptian

The Book of Mormon names its own writing system directly, in a passage its narrator Moroni includes near the record's close. He explains that the Nephites, the people whose history the record covers, had not preserved Hebrew, their ancestors' original language, in its pure form; instead, he writes, they had altered it according to their own manner of speech over the centuries since Lehi's family left Jerusalem around 600 BCE. What they wrote the record in instead, he says, was a form of Egyptian likewise reformed and altered by their own usage, learned because Lehi himself had been taught Egyptian, and passed down and adapted across the generations that followed him in the new land.

Moroni is explicit that this was a matter of practicality rather than preference: Hebrew, he writes, took up more space to convey the same meaning than the modified Egyptian characters did, and since the plates were a fixed, heavy medium with limited room, compressing centuries of history onto them required the more economical script. He adds a line of resignation rather than confidence, that if the plates had been large enough to allow it they would have written in Hebrew, and that no other people on earth would know how to read Reformed Egyptian besides the record's own writers and whoever God chose to give the gift of translating it.

Outside the faith, Reformed Egyptian has no independent existence. No inscription, ostracon, papyrus fragment or comparative grammar identified as Reformed Egyptian has ever been found or described by any Egyptologist, linguist or epigrapher working from evidence apart from the Book of Mormon's own text, and the name itself appears nowhere in the scholarly literature on ancient Egyptian or Mesoamerican writing systems except in discussions of the Book of Mormon claim itself. This differs from a case like Demotic, a genuinely attested late, simplified adaptation of hieroglyphic and hieratic Egyptian script that scholars can read, date and trace through a documented sequence of changes; Reformed Egyptian has no comparable trail of evidence to examine.

Believing Latter-day Saint scholars have offered various defenses, generally arguing that a small, isolated community modifying a foreign script over centuries for its own private use would be unlikely to leave surviving comparanda regardless of whether it existed, and pointing to genuinely attested cases of scripts adapted across language families as a general precedent for the kind of process the text describes. Mainstream Egyptological and Mesoamerican scholarship has not found this persuasive, and no institution outside the faith treats Reformed Egyptian as an attested ancient writing system; the disagreement remains, as with much of the Book of Mormon's historicity, a matter of faith claim against absence of independent evidence rather than a live linguistic debate.