Script Used On The Plates
The Voree Plates seem to be definitely written in an unknown alphabet. James Strang authored a personal diary during his youth, parts of which were written in a secret code which was not deciphered until over one hundred years later by Strang's own grandson. Comparison of the script used in the coded portions of Strang's diary and the script used on the Voree Plates shows remarkable similarities between the two.
Keith Thompson, of Manchester, England, alleges that the text on the plates matches Strang's published translation. Although he did not identify the values of specific characters, Thompson claimed to have shown how words such as "and", "in", and "are" appear in multiple places. According to a Strangite website, one Derek J. Masson, a non-Mormon scholar, reportedly argued in an unpublished 1977 paper: A Comparison of the Voree Record with Some Eastern Scripts that Strang's translation was sound. Furthermore, this same site alleges that a second non-Mormon scholar, Robert Madison, concluded in his 1990 A Preliminary Linguistic Analysis of James J. Strang's Voree Plates that the text on the plates appears to represent a genuine, albeit unknown, language, and that Strang's translation appeared to be "a superb (if poetic) rendition of that text into English."
Independent scholarly assessment of Masson's and Madison's conclusions has not yet been forthcoming.
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Famous quotes containing the words script and/or plates:
“Take what the old-church
found in Mithra’s tomb,
candle and script and bell,
take what the new-church spat upon
and broke and shattered.”
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“I have experienced such simple delight in the trivial matters of fishing and sporting, formerly, as might have inspired the muse of Homer or Shakespeare; and now, when I turn the pages and ponder the plates of the Angler’s Souvenir, I am fain to exclaim,—
“Can such things be,
And overcome us like a summer’s cloud?””
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)