145 replies to this topic

[mfbukowski]

Interesting.

Edited by mfbukowski, 28 April 2012 - 07:13 PM.

[cdowis]

Brant Gardner, on 27 April 2012 - 06:41 PM, said:

With as little information as I have seen, I would have to say that it is likely. However, making certain either way would involve much more work in historical linguistics of Shoshone.

That, of course, is the answer for any apparent cognate. It isn't accepted without a lot of work to make sure that it is, or is not, a cognate.

As for the argument that Lamanai would be a play on words, that is an interesting explanation for why an otherwise false cognate might have a connection. However, it is such a strained connection that without any other solid reason to propose it, the better answer is false cognate. In this case, we would have to assume that a people identified themselves with a Nephite exonym (which had pejorative connotations), or that there was an unattested use of Lamanite as a demonym for the people that the Nephites called Lamanites. Then we have to assume that the city of Lamanai had any connection to Book of Mormon peoples. It is too far from the best geography for that to be plausible.

1. Your argument boils down to "it's just a coincidence".  You use technical terms to hide that phrase, but I'm a simple sort of person.

No offense intended.  I am simply making an observation, that this is the same logic as the antis whenever we attempt to show evidence for the BOM.  Any evidence regarding the BOM has been brushed off as simply a coincidence.

No offense intended. I am simply making an observation, that this is the same logic as the antis whenever we attempt to show evidence for the BOM. You may feel uncomfortable in their company, but there it is.

2. Belize is not "near" to the BOM land?  Perhaps we are looking at different maps.

3. The Lamanites did not call themselves "Lamanites"?  Alma 54 [24] And behold now, I am abold Lamanite; behold, this war hath been waged to avenge their wrongs, and to maintain and to obtain their rights to the government; and I close my epistle to Moroni.

Having read the BOM, I can attest that at least the Lamanite leader called himself a Lamanite.  (I don't know the technical terms here, but you get my point).

But, again, I suspect that you have some technical jargon which basically argues that he did not actually write "Lamanite", but something else.  Another one of those nagging translation problems.

Perhaps it is another "coincidence", but everything about the BOM is just another coincidence.  We have no proof.

BTW, how did an Akkadian word get into the Nephite language?  Well, that goes back to the "others" (the Jaredites) who, after Nephi landed, showed them how to cultivate this grain (probably amaranth), and its name was passed on to them.  From the Jaredites to the Nephites.

No proof but an interesting idea.

Edited by cdowis, 29 April 2012 - 06:38 AM.

[volgadon]

Quote

No offense intended. I am simply making an observation, that this is the same logic as the antis whenever we attempt to show evidence for the BOM. You may feel uncomfortable in their company, but there it is.

Are we supposed to take absolutely any evidence for the BoM no matter how weak it is? Ludlow's defence of adieu springs to mind.

Edited by volgadon, 28 April 2012 - 10:19 PM.

[cdowis]

volgadon, on 28 April 2012 - 10:18 PM, said:

Are we supposed to take absolutely any evidence for the BoM no matter how weak it is? Ludlow's defence of adieu springs to mind.

Of course not, and I welcome any criticism of my apologetics.  Brent made several points and I responded to each.  The single argument standing is the universal argument against any evidence for the BOM, "it's a coincidence".

In this case, I gave three additional points to strengthen its relevance -- geography, its meaning in the context of a warrior class, and its play on words.

Edited by cdowis, 29 April 2012 - 07:11 AM.

[Brant Gardner]

cdowis, on 28 April 2012 - 10:14 PM, said:

2. Belize is not "near" to the BOM land?  Perhaps we are looking at different maps.

We must. You must be looking at some version of Joseph Allen's map (and pretty much accepted by the folk at BMAF). I am using Sorenson's. I find Sorenson's significantly superior, with quite a few problems in the Allen map (particularly along the east coast). It simply doesn't fit the text.

For the map that works with Mesoamerica, Belize is way to far away from the action to have been involved with the Book of Mormon peoples at all, no matter what they were called.

Yes, I think it is a coincidence. One can invent reasons to support the coincidence, but it never rises above coincidence.

Now, Robert Smith has shown good contextual information to support the Akkadian reading and provided a mechanism for its transfer. That rises above simple coincidence.

[Thinking]

Zakuska, on 26 April 2012 - 08:18 PM, said:

What are the chances of a Shoshone Indian Cheif assuming a Book of Mormon name within 16 years of Mormon Pioneers entering the Salt Lake Valley?

The more possibilities there are, the less likely it is for there to be no matches (or bulls-eyes, as they are frequently called on this board). Consequently, the existence of some bulls-eyes is expected.

For example, if you have to take a 20 question multiple choice test (5 choices per question) and you are guessing, what is the probability that you answer zero correctly? 0.01153 or 1.153%
n = # questions
r = # correct
Probability = nCr[(0.2)^r][(0.8^(n-r)]

# Correct (Probability)
0 (.01153)
1 (.05765)
2 (.13691)
3 (.20536)
4 (.21820)
5 (.17456)
6 (.10910)
7 (.05455)
8 (.02216)
9 (.00739)
10 (.00203)
11 (.000462)
12 (.0000866)
13 (.0000133)
14 (.00000166)
15 (.000000166)
16 (.000000013)
17 (.000000000765)
18 (.0000000000319)
19 (.000000000000839)
20 (.0000000000000105)

Note that you have a much better random chance of guessing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 correctly than 0.

Similarly, there are possible names that can be created using the alphabet and there are names in the Book of Mormon which are somewhat unique. Both values are certainly more than 20, so the probability of having zero matches (or bulls-eyes) would be much less than 1%. It would be surprising if there were no matches at all.

Zakuska, on 26 April 2012 - 08:18 PM, said:

Coincidence?

Yes.

Edited by Thinking, 29 April 2012 - 09:18 AM.

[LDSToronto]

cdowis, on 28 April 2012 - 10:14 PM, said:

1. Your argument boils down to "it's just a coincidence".  You use technical terms to hide that phrase, but I'm a simple sort of person.

No offense intended.  I am simply making an observation, that this is the same logic as the antis whenever we attempt to show evidence for the BOM.  Any evidence regarding the BOM has been brushed off as simply a coincidence.

No offense intended. I am simply making an observation, that this is the same logic as the antis whenever we attempt to show evidence for the BOM. You may feel uncomfortable in their company, but there it is.

And the original argument boils down to, "Two words sound the same, that must support the truthfulness the Book of Mormon".

No offense intended, but if you want to prove the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon based on linguistic anthropology, using the excuse, "I don't understand technical terms so you must be trying to trick me" doesn't bolster your case.

H.

[LDSToronto]

Zakuska, on 26 April 2012 - 08:18 PM, said:

What are the chances of a Shoshone Indian Cheif assuming a Book of Mormon name within 16 years of Mormon Pioneers entering the Salt Lake Valley?

Is it likely that English-speaking Mormon pioneers heard the chief's name and, based on a phonetic interpretation, assigned a name that sounded similar to something that was located within their cultural context?

H.

[volgadon]

This appears to be the same person.
"Te-ah-to-wah, Snag's brother, renamed Lehi..."
http://books.google....ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA

[volgadon]

calmoriah, on 27 April 2012 - 09:52 AM, said:

Adopting or being given names from settlers is not an uncommon practice.

Pocahontas was known as Rebecca later in her life, for example, taking the name when she converted to Christianity.
http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Pocahontas
Geronimo was given his name by Mexican soldiers.  http://en.wikipedia.....27s_background

One of the Shoshone chiefs was called "Bear Hunter", obviously a name given him by English speakers.  Another Shoshone was "One-eyed Tom."  Unless one can demonstrate that "Lehi" was his name prior to contact, then I don't see any evidence beyond what occurred in these other instances of name adoption.

http://historytogo.u...s/chapter2.html

I think I've found pretty good evidence that this was the case.

[bcuzbcuz]

The Carrier nation, (since I am acquainted with it) of mid-west British Columbia, did not count beyond the number three, prior to European influences. They saw no need in counting beyond that number. For them, saying you had caught 20 fish was immaterial. You could have caught 20 small fish that didn't amount to one, large fish, so merely stating a number was irrelevant. Beyond the number three they said you had sufficient, or not sufficient. 1-2-3, enough or not enough.

I think this makes a lot of sense. How much money do you make? Enough or not enough.

The task of counting the number of stars in the sky was, for example, truly of insignificant importance. What possible good could come from knowing how many stars there were. There were either enough or not enough.

When the europeans came, numbers above three had to be given names. So it was that the Carrier people gave the number 9 the name of zero-one. Think about it. How do we write the number nine?

Even today, the elders of the Carrier nation have difficulty grasping concepts of hundreds and thousands. These numbers just simply did not exist when they were growing up.

When the Europeans came, the Carrier people realized that numbers were significant....for the Europeans. The same was true for a written language. Written documents were unimportant prior to the Europeans; a mans word was the measure of worth. All this changed with the arrival of the white man's laws and ordinances.

The Europeans brought new words and new concepts. The Carrier nation was a matriarchal society. But the Europeans wanted to know who was chief and simply could not accept that a woman was in charge. So the Carrier picked a male chief to represent their nation and that has persisted until this day...but their community is still matriarchal.

An example of how European influences shape present situations is that, in the Carrier language, there is no letter "C" and no letter "R". This people's anglicized name contains 4 letters that don't even exist in their own language.

CDOWIS asked the question whether; that one looks at the consonants, and ignore the vowels?

That may be true of Hebrew but is certainly not true of the Carrier language, which belongs to the Athabaska language group.  (Which for further reference I will no longer call Carrier, but Tsek'ehne)

In the Tsek'ehne language vowels play a very significant difference. A vowel change could mean a completely different word, much like 'big' and 'bag' or 'bug' in English.

In the Sho'shoni language, for example, there are five vowel sounds, six, if you include the diphthong 'ai'

Furthermore, sounds exist in Native American languages that simply do not exist in English. There is a guttural click attached to the sounds of "K'"; and "Tl'"; that are difficult to master for the Germanic language speaker. Equally, speakers of Native American languages have difficulty with some sounds common to English.

The OP of this topic asks whether the name of Lehi, apparently of a Shoshoni chief, is significant. That all depends on who is interpreting what was actually said. Check out the Sho'shoni language page at: http://en.wikipedia....oshoni_language

Did the Shoshoni chief actually have the name of Lehi or where the settlers merely hearing the sound they wanted to hear?

Edited by bcuzbcuz, 29 April 2012 - 04:05 PM.

[cdowis]

Brant Gardner, on 29 April 2012 - 07:27 AM, said:

We must. You must be looking at some version of Joseph Allen's map (and pretty much accepted by the folk at BMAF). I am using Sorenson's. I find Sorenson's significantly superior, with quite a few problems in the Allen map (particularly along the east coast). It simply doesn't fit the text.

For the map that works with Mesoamerica, Belize is way to far away from the action to have been involved with the Book of Mormon peoples at all, no matter what they were called.

"The Mayan civilization spread into the area of Belize between 1500 BC and AD 300 and flourished until about AD 1200."  http://www.state.gov...ei/bgn/1955.htm

It is possible that it was a minor colony.  I did not claim that the city was an active participant in BOM culture.

Edited by cdowis, 29 April 2012 - 07:34 PM.

[LDSToronto]

bcuzbcuz, on 29 April 2012 - 03:57 PM, said:

Did the Shoshoni chief actually have the name of Lehi or where the settlers merely hearing the sound they wanted to hear?

If I could applaud I would.

H.

[volgadon]

LDSToronto, on 29 April 2012 - 05:37 PM, said:

If I could applaud I would.

H.

It appears that the answer is neither. He was given the unrelated name of Lehi by the Mormons.

[Robert F. Smith]

Thinking, on 29 April 2012 - 09:17 AM, said:

The more possibilities there are, the less likely it is for there to be no matches (or bulls-eyes, as they are frequently called on this board). Consequently, the existence of some bulls-eyes is expected.

For example, if you have to take a 20 question multiple choice test (5 choices per question) and you are guessing, what is the probability that you answer zero correctly? 0.01153 or 1.153%

. . , there are possible names that can be created using the alphabet and there are names in the Book of Mormon which are somewhat unique. Both values are certainly more than 20, so the probability of having zero matches (or bulls-eyes) would be much less than 1%. It would be surprising if there were no matches at all.

Your multiple-guess example doesn't comport with the types of onomastic evidence which can be brought to bear on the question of the authenticity of the unique (non-biblical) names found in the Book of Mormon.

For example, none of those unique names uses the common theophoric suffix -iah (as in Zedekiah, Jeremiah, Isaiah, etc.), but we do find about seven Book of Mormon names terminating in -ihah, and one non-Mormon Hebraist suggested that the two are to be equated.  A number of Mormon scholars have made the same suggestion.  That BofM termination would be written YHH in Hebrew consonantal text, which is precisely what we find being used in the 5th century B.C. Jewish military colony at Elephantine, Egypt.  Indeed, the Koehler & Baumgarter Hebrew Lexicon sees YHH as equivalent to YHWH.

Another very odd "coincidence" comes to notice when we consider the BofM name Mulek (variant Muloch), the name of a son of King Zedekiah.  Mulek somehow escapes the Babylonian sword and comes to the Americas.  A couple of non-Mormon scholars have each commented on how appropriate that name could be, the most prominent of them the late David Noel Freedman telling me in 1984:  "If Joseph Smith came up with that one, he did pretty good!"  Why?  Because, not only was this an acceptable pronounciation of the short form of the name, but the long form of the name, Malchiah son of the King, not only shows up in the KJV Bible (Jer 38:6 Malchiah the son of Hammelech), but also in inscriptions at Arad -- leading the late Israeli archeologist Yohanan Aharoni to conclude that this was the actual name of a son of Zedekiah.  Before that everyone had assumed that all the sons of Zedekiah were executed by the Babylonians.

I could go on with a long list, but you get the idea:  Joseph could not guess at names entailing that degree of complexity.

Quote

LDS Toronto said:
And the original argument boils down to, "Two words sound the same, that must support the truthfulness the Book of Mormon".

No offense intended, but if you want to prove the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon based on linguistic anthropology, using the excuse, "I don't understand technical terms so you must be trying to trick me" doesn't bolster your case.
H.

Anything can be tagged as "coincidence," and you may be right to fault old Amerindian and pioneer tales about names used on the frontier.

The real question is, what would you consider satisfactory, non-coincidental evidence from the Book of Mormon onomasticon?

[cdowis]

Looking at a single "coincidence" is not very impressive, but when you have more than a dozen of them you now have a tapestry of evidence.

Lamanai, Paanchi, Pahoran, sheum, Bountiful (twelve points of reference, Valley of Lemuel, NHM, cement, Mulek, etc  Taken as a whole, rather than individual instances, it is no longer "just a coincidence".

[Log]

Robert F. Smith, on 04 May 2012 - 06:05 AM, said:

For example, none of those unique names uses the common theophoric suffix -iah (as in Zedekiah, Jeremiah, Isaiah, etc.), but we do find about seven Book of Mormon names terminating in -ihah, and one non-Mormon Hebraist suggested that the two are to be equated.  A number of Mormon scholars have made the same suggestion.  That BofM termination would be written YHH in Hebrew consonantal text, which is precisely what we find being used in the 5th century B.C. Jewish military colony at Elephantine, Egypt.  Indeed, the Koehler & Baumgarter Hebrew Lexicon sees YHH as equivalent to YHWH.

One Mormon scholar concludes the opposite, and seems to have rather compelling reasons for it.

In any event, unless Thinking has an actual chance hypothesis that he can produce which attaches probabilities to the use of names in the Book of Mormon, he's engaged in pseudo-mathematics and covering his prejudices in the language of probability, as so many are wont to do.

[Benjamin McGuire]

Thinking is exactly right though.

If we compare any two languages we are going to find overlap. If we didn't, it would be incredibly unusual. So, we know from this, that coincidences of this sort really do happen. From here, Robert Smith asks the big question:

"The real question is, what would you consider satisfactory, non-coincidental evidence from the Book of Mormon onomasticon?"

How do we differentiate between similarities that are purely coincidental and those that aren't. In general, its not a matter of piling up all the similarities. A large pile of similarities is completely worthless without some sort of framework in which to understand them. It's not about any particular instance, even if there seems to be uncanny resemblances in how the onomasticon are used and in their respective contexts. We have to work with a predictive model that doesn't stop at every example that really is a coincidence. And we have to produce some basic criteria to evaluate what might really be evidence (because, as we see, the similarities in the OP may not be coincidental at all, but the direction of borrowing may start from the English published version of the Book of Mormon - counter to the OP's general expectation).

Ben M.

[mfbukowski]

Robert F. Smith, on 04 May 2012 - 06:05 AM, said:

Your multiple-guess example doesn't comport with the types of onomastic evidence which can be brought to bear on the question of the authenticity of the unique (non-biblical) names found in the Book of Mormon.

For example, none of those unique names uses the common theophoric suffix -iah (as in Zedekiah, Jeremiah, Isaiah, etc.), but we do find about seven Book of Mormon names terminating in -ihah, and one non-Mormon Hebraist suggested that the two are to be equated.  A number of Mormon scholars have made the same suggestion.  That BofM termination would be written YHH in Hebrew consonantal text, which is precisely what we find being used in the 5th century B.C. Jewish military colony at Elephantine, Egypt.  Indeed, the Koehler & Baumgarter Hebrew Lexicon sees YHH as equivalent to YHWH.

Another very odd "coincidence" comes to notice when we consider the BofM name Mulek (variant Muloch), the name of a son of King Zedekiah.  Mulek somehow escapes the Babylonian sword and comes to the Americas.  A couple of non-Mormon scholars have each commented on how appropriate that name could be, the most prominent of them the late David Noel Freedman telling me in 1984:  "If Joseph Smith came up with that one, he did pretty good!"  Why?  Because, not only was this an acceptable pronounciation of the short form of the name, but the long form of the name, Malchiah son of the King, not only shows up in the KJV Bible (Jer 38:6 Malchiah the son of Hammelech), but also in inscriptions at Arad -- leading the late Israeli archeologist Yohanan Aharoni to conclude that this was the actual name of a son of Zedekiah.  Before that everyone had assumed that all the sons of Zedekiah were executed by the Babylonians.

I could go on with a long list, but you get the idea:  Joseph could not guess at names entailing that degree of complexity.


Anything can be tagged as "coincidence," and you may be right to fault old Amerindian and pioneer tales about names used on the frontier.

The real question is, what would you consider satisfactory, non-coincidental evidence from the Book of Mormon onomasticon?

Amazing post.

U be a genu-wine smart guy.

[cdowis]

You are merely stating the obvious -- we all agree that we cannot prove the BOM thru such things, but can only show things that are "interesting".  

The tapestry of evidence is comforting to those who accept the BOM as authentic history.  For others, it is merely piling up coincidences.

Edited by cdowis, 04 May 2012 - 08:50 AM.