Moroni’s purpose in writing (at this point) was to establish his witness of his father’s book. Part of that task is his colophon identifying the writing and the method, first mentioned in Mormon 8:13–14. He returns to that colophon after his long discourse addressed to various groups of future readers. This return is, in my opinion, another evidence Moroni was not writing from a formal plan but simply moving from one topic to another as they presented themselves to his mind. In contrast to his father’s careful organization and terse prose, Moroni rambles. His style is more informal, more unfocused, and significantly less literary than Mormon’s.
Culture: Moroni has testified that it is his hand and his father’s hand that have written the text. That statement establishes his filial relationship. Now he talks about the writing itself. He begins by explaining that Hebrew would have taken up too much room on the plates. Written Hebrew is certainly already a condensed writing system, omitting vowels present in spoken Hebrew. While typically the full text is easy to reconstruct, ambiguities in meaning can emerge when the context would support two different words with only the vowel’s difference. (An English example would be “farm” or “form.”) Thus, Hebrew writing is inherently prone to this kind of error; and Moroni is acknowledging that his own writing system is even more prone to error than standard Hebrew. Moroni attributes at least some of the imperfections in his father’s work to the difficulty in communicating accurately in writing, but he fails to supply enough information to allow conjecture about that writing system.
However, the very fact that Moroni says he and his father did not use Hebrew communicates that it was preserved as a scholarly language. There must have been some writings in Hebrew that continued from Lehi’s days, or Moroni could not have learned Hebrew or know that it had been a rejected option for his father.
Verse 32 identifies what he and Mormon used instead of Hebrew: “the characters which are called among us the reformed Egyptian, being handed down and altered by us, according to our manner of speech.” The fact that it is “reformed” means that it is somehow different from the Egyptian in Nephi’s record (1 Ne. 1:2, Mosiah 1:4). The most important detail is the relationship between the characters and the Nephite “manner of speech,” apparently one that does not carry over to Hebrew. As I read this statement, reformed Egyptian seems to represent the Nephite spoken language. He does not explicitly state that Hebrew does not (or cannot) represent the Nephite spoken language, but the fact that reformed Egyptian best represents it suggests that we should not seek Hebrew meanings beneath the English translation.