Moroni states that his and his father's abridgment was written "in the characters which are called among us the reformed Egyptian" (Mormon 9:32). He also states that "if our plates had been sufficiently large we should have written in Hebrew," however, "the Hebrew hath been altered by us also" (Mormon 9:33).
Although it is hard to know what Moroni meant when he said that "the Hebrew hath been altered by us also," Richardson, Richardson and Bentley write that the sacred record was apparently "engraved" on gold plates in reformed Egyptian rather than Hebrew because Hebrew characters are not suitable for engraving, but are designed to be painted by brush strokes--each part of a given character having thicker or thinner brush strokes to convey a precise meaning. Thus, a greater amount of space would have been required to enable the recorder to make the characters sufficiently distinguishable for interpretation. Dr. Hugh Nibley points out that the Nephites saved much space by using Egyptian characters. [Allen H. Richardson, David E. Richardson and Anthony E. Bentley, 1000 Evidences for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Part Two-A Voice from the Dust: 500 Evidences in Support of the Book of Mormon, p. 251]
“The Hebrew Hath Been Altered by Us Also”
Moroni seems to indicate in Mormon 9:33 that at least he and his father Mormon still knew a version of Hebrew, for he admits that "if our plates had been sufficiently large we should have written in Hebrew; but the Hebrew hath been altered by us also." According to Warren and Ferguson, in the early 1960s, Pierre Agrinier gathered a 600 word vocabulary from a Zapotec village in Oaxaca, Mexico. Linguists found that 18% of these 600 words appeared to be cognate with Hebrew. [Bruce W. Warren and Thomas Stuart Ferguson, The Messiah in Ancient America, p. 203]
In an ongoing doctrinal study, Brian Stubbs deals with the question of whether elements of Hebrew language could be detected among native tongues of the Uto-Aztecan family, which cover western North America, central and southern Mexico. . . . A primary paper presents 203 equivalences between Semitic and Uto-Aztecan. Material still being analyzed contains over two hundred additional possibilities. While the similarities do not demonstrate a clear Hebrew descendancy, they do suggest that Hebrew was one of the ancestor languages. What Stubbs suggests is that a process of "creolization" may have been involved. That is, a new "mixed" language was created from two or more active ones. This description matches quite well the description given by Moroni of the changes that had taken place in the Nephite language over the years--that the traditional language was handed down but altered according to the manner of their contemporary spoken language (see Mormon 9:32-34). [Based on research by Brian Stubbs, "Hebrew and Uto-Aztecan: Possible Linguistic Connections," in Reexploring the Book of Mormon, pp. 279-281]