stemelbow wrote:Considering that there are characters which are not found on the papyrus can we surmise, at all, that Joseph and his partners were using the characters for something else, as Will seems to conclude?
In my opinion, no. Joseph regarded the characters on the papyrus as composite characters, comprised of smaller symbolic graphemes. So it makes sense that a lexicon of this language would need to focus on these simpler sub-shapes rather than the full-fledged composite characters. I regard Parts 1-2a of the EA as a catalogue of invented sub-shapes. Then when Joseph changed strategies in Part 2b and began breaking down actual characters from the papyrus into sub-shapes for translation, it raised some grammatical questions about how the dissected shapes relate to the composite character. That's why he started to the GAEL, which tries to address such questions in more detail.
My question here suggests, at least to me, that they were perhaps defining the characters themselves rather than attempting to use those characters for translation.
I actually do think the language project was, to some extent, an end in itself. Certain comments made by Joseph's scribes suggest the Grammar was a product of revelation, and there is some very interesting theological content embedded in the language's structure and the character explanations. However, in my opinion the evidence that they used it for translation is quite strong. At the very least, it was used to translate a character from the Kinderhook Plates (as Don Bradley recently argued at the FAIR Conference). But I also see good reason to think it was used to translate the Katumin notebooks, the Facsimile 2 explanation, and parts of Abraham chapter 1.