Voree Plates - Script Used On The Plates

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 According to a Strangite website, one Derek J. Masson, a non-Mormon scholar, reportedly argued in an unpublished 1977 paper: A Comparison of the Voree Record with Some Eastern Scripts that Strang's translation was sound.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.