Mi'kmaq vs. the Gold Plates: Does the Comparison Hold Up?

So now that we've established what the characters document is, it sounds like, uh, the people who published this book are comparing characters document glyphs to Mi'kmaq, and you see that there's, like, a kind of a problem there.

W- what is this Mi'kmaq language? Let's kind of break that down for a minute.

Okay.

That, that's the other issue that you run across, is the, the Mi'kmaq language, even the, you know, what's the genesis of it?

Mm-hmm.

Okay? Because if you're gonna try to do a comparison to some Native American language, you got to look at, you know, what it is.

And the, the, the s- basically the history of it is that there was a 17th century p- A French Catholic priest who, um, was teaching, uh, prayers and things to the, the Native American, the Mi'kmaq Native Americans, and he noticed that they were ...

There was some birch bark.

They had some- something on it, and they were kind of just, like, using it to memorize the Catholic prayers, and so he recognized, okay, they have some, uh, there's some knowledge of something.

Okay.

But then he, he says he created a hieroglyphic kind of language, which he then used to teach the Catholic prayers.

Mm.

And so-

And this is 1600s?

Yeah, and you can ...

We've got an example of it, and I've got ...

This is, this is an example.

Right, and so you can kind of see the construct of it.

So the question is, first of all, was it, is this really a legitimate lang- l- i- it's way too, too recent, right?

Yeah.

But it's kind of like, okay ...

And, and so people are claiming, "Well, this is the original Native American language." I think it basically, if anything, maybe it incorporated a few glyphs that they were looking at.

And there is birch bark records of this timeframe, not with the Mi'kmaq, but with the Ojibwe.

There's other tribes that did have some, but they were mostly, like, ceremonial, r- you know, demonstrating their ceremonials, things, or animals.

They weren't, like, some systematic hieroglyphic type of system.

So now that we've established what the characters document is, it sounds like, uh, the people who published this book are comparing characters document glyphs to Mi'kmaq, and you see that there's, like, a kind of a problem there.

W- what is this Mi'kmaq language? Let's kind of break that down for a minute.

Okay.

That, that's the other issue that you run across, is the, the Mi'kmaq language, even the, you know, what's the genesis of it?

Mm-hmm.

Okay? Because if you're gonna try to do a comparison to some Native American language, you got to look at, you know, what it is.

And the, the, the s- basically the history of it is that there was a 17th century p- A French Catholic priest who, um, was teaching, uh, prayers and things to the, the Native American, the Mi'kmaq Native Americans, and he noticed that they were ...

There was some birch bark.

They had some- something on it, and they were kind of just, like, using it to memorize the Catholic prayers, and so he recognized, okay, they have some, uh, there's some knowledge of something.

Okay.

But then he, he says he created a hieroglyphic kind of language, which he then used to teach the Catholic prayers.

Mm.

And so-

And this is 1600s?

Yeah, and you can ...

We've got an example of it, and I've got ...

This is, this is an example.

Right, and so you can kind of see the construct of it.

So the question is, first of all, was it, is this really a legitimate lang- l- i- it's way too, too recent, right?

Yeah.

But it's kind of like, okay ...

And, and so people are claiming, "Well, this is the original Native American language." I think it basically, if anything, maybe it incorporated a few glyphs that they were looking at.

And there is birch bark records of this timeframe, not with the Mi'kmaq, but with the Ojibwe.

There's other tribes that did have some, but they were mostly, like, ceremonial, r- you know, demonstrating their ceremonials, things, or animals.

They weren't, like, some systematic hieroglyphic type of system.