I realize that time and atmosphere are two issues for you when it comes to the discussion that started on the other board. But as I followed the conversation and reviewed several threads that went back several years, a few patterns emerged, and I wanted to float it for your review. Don't feel rushed to respond, and best of luck with your qualifications. I'll just try to organize my thoughts here succintly and look for your feedback when you're free. I'd love to hear from George Miller and Mortal Man as well.
It starts with the sounds in the GAEL. On the other board, Wade lists four reasons he believes that the GAEL can't be used as a translation document for the Book of Abraham. I would add the GAEL sounds as the fifth. Why do we need sounds in a text-to-text translation project? Even if the dependency is in the direction you posit, why do we need sounds?
Flash back to several threads that date back to 2009 where several of you are commenting on two MI reviews (by Frederick Huchel and John Gee) of Joe Sampson's Written by the Finger of God (Sandy: Wellspring, 1993). Around this time I start to see a gradual crescendo in the thesis that culminates in the most recent posts by George Miller, Mortal Man and yourself tying dissections in their aggragate to hieratic characters on the Hor scroll. As I reviewed several years worth of threads in a compressed period of time, the pattern that starts to emerge is very similar to Sampson's thesis.
Take George Miller's post #57 on the Book of Abraham/Book of Breathings Controversy thread at MDaD. He provides the dissections for za ki aan hi ash and proposes a character of which these dissections are a comglomorate. A little earlier (post #45 on the same page), Mortal Man discusses the character with the sound of KiAbroham, linking it to an Egyptian W character that was on the Hor scroll originally.
Sampson discusses za ki aan hi ash on page 122 of his text, breaking down the dissections. The next character he breaks down (p. 123) is KiAbroham, but the salient part that introduces the discussion of this character is this:
I do not pretend to understand all of the keys Joseph is giving us here nor to be able in all respects to duplicate completely the power of dissection needed to break every character down into all of its parts, but we will attack some of the less complex character combinations and show how Joseph extracted the Book of Abraham from the hieratic portion of the Book of Breathings (Sampson, 123).
Whatever flaws Sampson's theory may hold (and there a few), what it does provide is a fairly complete system that takes us from the hieratic characters on the Hor scroll to the definitions and dissections in the GAEL. And this is where we come back to the sounds, because the sounds in the GAEL are exactly what tie this system together, while they make almost no sense in any other system. Some of these sounds can be tied to a rudimentary type of Hebrew that in turn can be tied to a version of the Hebrew notarikon encoding system based on the meanings behind the original shapes of the Hebrew/proto-Hebrew characters to which the sounds have reference. This ties the shapes of some of the characters directly to the sounds given. What Sampson never really did effectively, however, was methodically creating the conglomorate of characters from the dissections and then tying the characters to the hieratic. But this seems to be the latest step being explored by several of you--completing the system, so to speak.
If there is any truth to what I've laid out in terms of the direction you guys are headed, an observation and a question. Sampson's system, of course, is based on the idea that this is an after-the fact mechanical break down of what Joseph Smith could do intuitively and by revelation and assumes an already-revealed text. You guys seem to be taking his train of thought in the opposite direction--i.e., you use the system to link the EA/GAEL to specific hieratic characters and then use that product as the translation mechanism. I believe that the threat of this train of thought is the real reason for Gee's rather strident review.
But I'm mostly interested to see if you plan to link the sounds to the characters in the same way through Notrarikon and other techniques of Hebrew encoding. This would seem to be the logical way of linking everything together in the manner that the pattern has been unfolding.
Thoughts?
Cheers