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Constraining the Book of Mormon creation: who, when, and where


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In reviewing more of the biblical passages in the Book of Mormon, it seems almost certain it has to be dated post-KJV. Tyndale never got to Isaiah and the Book of Mormon Isaiah passages are much more similar to the KJV than to any earlier version such as the Geneva Bible. It just doesn't seem possible that the Book of Mormon was produced prior to 1611. I'm pretty comfortable for now with a tentative range of 1611-1829, but of course i'm hoping folks can help me narrow this down more. 

I spent some time with the weapons and armor in the Book of Mormon and studying the ngrams. In total, I think my review supports at least the 17th century, rather than the 16th. One thought I had was that the absence of the word "helmet" -  with "head-plate" or "shields to defend their heads" being used instead seems to indicate the producer of the Book of Mormon didn't know the word "helmet." While certainly not conclusive, I just can't imagine an educated person in the post-Napoleonic world would not know that word.

Edited to add that since "helmet" appears several times in the KJV it's likely the word was known but deliberately not used in the Book of Mormon.

Edited by JarMan
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On 6/1/2017 at 6:45 PM, Brant Gardner said:

Lack of authentic texts that show Joseph's dialect prior to the time it was being influenced by members of the church from different educational backgrounds is scant. Some elements appear to show up in early revelations, and if that is correct, then the thesis that they had all disappeared is severely weakened. That at least allows the late 1820's as a production date for the Book of Mormon English text.

Brant, these are dubious claims. In this domain, extensive descriptive linguistic work must precede opinion. My hope is that you begin to examine a large amount of textual evidence.

Early Doctrine and Covenants revelations were received like the Book of Mormon. In theory, they too could have been revealed to Joseph Smith word for word. Because their production involves the same unresolved question, they cannot be used to argue for your thesis. One must argue from other unrelated evidence. Stan

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22 hours ago, champatsch said:

Brant, these are dubious claims. In this domain, extensive descriptive linguistic work must precede opinion. My hope is that you begin to examine a large amount of textual evidence.

Early Doctrine and Covenants revelations were received like the Book of Mormon. In theory, they too could have been revealed to Joseph Smith word for word. Because their production involves the same unresolved question, they cannot be used to argue for your thesis. One must argue from other unrelated evidence. Stan

And that is the funny thing about data. We can agree on the data, and disagree on the conclusion. For example, I think that the fact that early Doctrine and Covenants revelations show some of the same features is very strong evidence that those features were retained in his dialect.

It might be useful to recap where we agree and disagree.

1) Agree: there are elements of Early Modern English that explain the apparent grammatical errors as examples of previously acceptable forms.

2) Agree: the translation of the Book of Mormon was miraculous and inspired.

3) Agree: Joseph saw words when he used the translators or a seer stone.

1) Disagree: The EME elements we see must have disappeared from English and therefore were unavailable to Joseph.

2) Disagree: Who translated from the plate text into English

3) Disagree: When the translation occurred.

Do I have any of those points incorrectly stated?

 

 

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I'm very interested in what people have to say about what Joseph's dialect may have been vs. what is in the Book of Mormon. But I'm also wondering if it would be fruitful to look at events in 17th or 18th century Europe to help inform us about what is in the Book of Mormon. For example, the Lord of the Rings contains elements of warfare and politics that point to the author having a knowledge of WWI and, to a lesser extent, WWII. If we take the issue of warfare in the Book of Mormon, it is constant and, in the end, apocalyptic. This might be an indication that the producer of the book was familiar with the 30 years war in Europe during the first half of the 17th Century. But it also might mean the person was familiar with the French and American Revolutionary wars and the Napoleonic wars. Or what about the civilization/government types in the Book of Mormon? They don't seem like types that existed in the 1820's (either with the Indians or with Westerners) or even like Europe in the previous few centuries. The Nephite and Lamanite civilizations seem more like the "barbarian" cultures that existed during late Roman Empire times - more chiefdom than kindgom, but not quite tribal like the Indians Joseph Smith would have been familiar with. I'm interested in hearing insights from this, and other related, angles.

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1 hour ago, JarMan said:

I'm very interested in what people have to say about what Joseph's dialect may have been vs. what is in the Book of Mormon. But I'm also wondering if it would be fruitful to look at events in 17th or 18th century Europe to help inform us about what is in the Book of Mormon. For example, the Lord of the Rings contains elements of warfare and politics that point to the author having a knowledge of WWI and, to a lesser extent, WWII. If we take the issue of warfare in the Book of Mormon, it is constant and, in the end, apocalyptic. This might be an indication that the producer of the book was familiar with the 30 years war in Europe during the first half of the 17th Century. But it also might mean the person was familiar with the French and American Revolutionary wars and the Napoleonic wars. Or what about the civilization/government types in the Book of Mormon? They don't seem like types that existed in the 1820's (either with the Indians or with Westerners) or even like Europe in the previous few centuries. The Nephite and Lamanite civilizations seem more like the "barbarian" cultures that existed during late Roman Empire times - more chiefdom than kindgom, but not quite tribal like the Indians Joseph Smith would have been familiar with. I'm interested in hearing insights from this, and other related, angles.

There is no reason not to look, but it will be hard to find correspondences. I am reminded of Richard Bushman who thought he would go through the Book of Mormon and show how it supported an American-style government for the country's bicentennial. He expected to find it, but when he looked closely, it wasn't similar to that at all. 

My personal examination of the elements of the text show the closest cultural and historical connections to the times indicated in the Book of Mormon and Mesoamerica. The largest collection of those is in my Traditions of the Fathers book, but you will find many things online that were FairMormon or BMAF presentations--and are free.

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3 hours ago, JarMan said:

The Nephite and Lamanite civilizations seem more like the "barbarian" cultures that existed during late Roman Empire times - more chiefdom than kindgom, but not quite tribal like the Indians Joseph Smith would have been familiar with. I'm interested in hearing insights from this, and other related, angles.

One way to look at this is to take all the elements in the material culture of the Jaredites starting around 2500 BC and Lehites/Mulekites starting in the 6th century BC. Overlay the known distribution of those elements on a world map to see if all elements overlap at any point near a narrow neck of land. 

There are two elements that constrain the map in a way that cannot be ignored: domesticated elephants and silk. We know with near certainty that there were no domesticated elephants in 2500 BC outside of South and Southeast Asia. We also know with near certainty that there were no silkworms outside of East and Southeast Asia in 2500 BC. So those two elements alone constrain the map to Southeast Asia. 

The interesting thing is that for many centuries Southeast Asia was considered to be the location of the Garden of Eden and Paradise, as well as the Island of the Blessed in accounts dating from at least the 3rd century AD to the early 17th century AD. It was only towards the end of the 17th century that America started to replace the Orient as the location of the Garden. So if we also constrain the BOM text to the first half of the 17th century, we should expect the translator of the text to be more familiar with the accounts and geography of the Orient than with accounts and geography of the New World. As mentioned above, there was a flurry of ludibriums in the 16th and early 17th century describing the New World as an island utopia set somewhere between the West Indies and the East Indies. The Book of Mormon fits this genre well, but also appears to have some accurate historical references that could not have been known to Joseph Smith or anyone in 1820s New York.

Edited by Rajah Manchou
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13 hours ago, Brant Gardner said:

And that is the funny thing about data. We can agree on the data, and disagree on the conclusion. For example, I think that the fact that early Doctrine and Covenants revelations show some of the same features is very strong evidence that those features were retained in his dialect.

It might be useful to recap where we agree and disagree.

1) Agree: there are elements of Early Modern English that explain the apparent grammatical errors as examples of previously acceptable forms.

2) Agree: the translation of the Book of Mormon was miraculous and inspired.

3) Agree: Joseph saw words when he used the translators or a seer stone.

1) Disagree: The EME elements we see must have disappeared from English and therefore were unavailable to Joseph.

2) Disagree: Who translated from the plate text into English

3) Disagree: When the translation occurred.

Do I have any of those points incorrectly stated?

1) Disagree:  For clarification: Some EME elements disappeared by Joseph's time, many EME elements carried through to modern English. Those that did not carry through and are not found in the KJB were highly unlikely to have been produced by Joseph using a biblical/modern mixture. Various aspects of the grammar (like the verbal system) and some vocabulary fall into this category.

3) Disagree: For clarification: If Joseph is the translator, then after ideas were revealed to him. If the Lord is the translator, then before the time that the words began to be transmitted. This would be before early 1828. It could have started after the KJB was published, but then updating would have occurred later. It could have all occurred in the late 1700s or the early 1800s.

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Any translation has to take into consideration the intended audience.

The first problem is that the Book of Mormon, if it uses archaic language is a lousy translation if we assume that the target audience first reads the book in 1830. The second problem is what do we do with the parts of the Book of Mormon that are inconsistent with EME? The vocabulary itself is part of this problem because, of course, the text contains many words which are (as far as we can tell) coined by Shakespeare (and potentially later - I know of no one who has dated the entire 5,000+ word vocabulary of the Book of Mormon). This sort of inclusion means that the text was not potentially meant for an audience near 1611. What do we do with the sections that paraphrase passages from the Bible and update the language of the KJV? How do we deal with a translation that seems to interpret an historical text into an early 19th century context (part of what we would expect with a fluent translation made in the early 19th century)?

As I noted last August, we run into a problem. Either the translation is fluent and prepared with a different audience in mind than the one that eventually became its first readership, or the translation isn't entirely fluent because this was part of the overall strategy of the text (part of its presentation) to help its first audience understand that the text was a translation and not an original work. Both circumstances can help explain the language issue. But in either case, most of the discussion above deals very little with the meaning of the text. That meaning has to include an understanding of audience, and how that audience reads the text. And it should also include the idea of the meaning of the text as an artifact - that is, how the text as a whole is understood and the role that it plays for its audience.

Ben McGuire

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13 hours ago, Brant Gardner said:

I think that the fact that early Doctrine and Covenants revelations show some of the same features is very strong evidence that those features were retained in his dialect.

I'd like to explore this with you further, since I don't think early D&C revelations can reasonably be used as evidence in this regard.

Besides section 2, which was set down in writing years after 1823, first there was the translation of the lost 116 pages in early 1828, then there were three early D&C revelations received before the translation of the BofM was resumed (sections 3,4,5), and during the second period of translation (April to June 1829) there were other early D&C revelations received (basically up to section 18).

General understanding is that these early D&C revelations were received similar to how the BofM was received. David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ, 1887, 53. Headings to many of these D&C revelations. See Stan Spencer's 2017 Interpreter article, volume 24, pages 47 and 73 (note 2).

Is that your understanding?

If so, then how have you determined that these early D&C revelations certainly represent Joseph's own language?  D&C 1:24?  Something else?

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54 minutes ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

The first problem is that the Book of Mormon, if it uses archaic language is a lousy translation if we assume that the target audience first reads the book in 1830.

Not sure where you want to go with this, but the BofM does use archaic language quite a bit, and I don't think I'd say it's a lousy translation. I'd call it a masterful, eclectic translation that demonstrates philological expertise. Here I refer to the form and structure. In terms of the content, my currently preferred label is dynamic translation, moving between literal and free.

The vocabulary was filtered for recognition but not in some cases for obsolescence. Most of the time we get the obsolete meaning from context, but sometimes the meaning is obscure. For instance, what exactly does "by a garb of secrecy" mean? Can we be sure of the meaning? I don't think so. I can think of at least two possible meanings.  The vocabulary goes all the way into the 1740s, in terms of when it was first introduced into English, such as derangement, out of French, first attested in 1737, I think.  But some vocabulary is last attested in the 1500s, like counsel meaning 'consult', as in counsel the Lord.

The verbal system is archaic in many respects, but it doesn't usually impede understanding. Some of the shall/should subjunctive marking can be confusing to readers, and more so today than in 1830.  But the BofM is easier to understand, generally speaking, than the KJB. That is partly due to the fact that there are many more modern elements in the text than in the KJB.  But it's a complex matter, with various exceptions in every domain. Take "the more part of X", 26 times, including two rare variants.  Overall, it's a transparent usage that is last used comparably to the BofM in Holinshed's Chronicles (1577).  The five books that I've seen that have usage comparable to the BofM were printed in the 1500s.

Consider

(3 Nephi 29:4 • page 641)

And behold, at that day, if ye shall spurn at his doings, he will cause it that it shall soon overtake you.

Definitely archaic and not biblical syntax at the end. Unlikely to be Joseph's language. Found in the 1600s, but not difficult to understand:

1626EEBO A17306 Henry Burton [1578–1648] A plea to an appeale trauersed dialogue wise

For how is it meere mercy, if any good in us foreseene, first caused it, that it should offer a Saviour to us?

1616EEBO A00419 Richard Surflet, tr. [fl. 1600–1616] | Gervase Markham, tr. [1568?–1637] | Charles Estienne [1504–ca. 1564] | Jean Liébault [about 1535–1596] Maison rustique, or The countrey farme

To prevent the decay of beere, and to cause it that it may continue and stand good a long time

1634EEBO A08911 Thomas Johnson, tr. [d. 1644] | Ambroise Paré [1510?–1590] Works

which causeth it that it cannot be discussed and resolved by reason of the weakenesse of the part and defect of heate

1697EEBO A48873 John Locke [1632–1704] [doubtful attribution] A common-place book to the Holy Bible

When this Epistle is read among you, cause it that it be read also in the Church of Laodicea

 

Etc.

Edited by champatsch
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14 minutes ago, champatsch said:

If so, then how have you determined that these early D&C revelations certainly represent Joseph's own language?  D&C 1:24?  Something else?

Parsimony. The revelations were not the result of translation, though certainly inspiration. Joseph's language improved after he was in contact with people from different locations and greater educational levels, but he still received revelations. Positing a non-Joseph source for the vocabulary makes it harder to explain the whole of Joseph's work. Positing Joseph as the source of language makes the changes in vocabulary and grammar over time logical.

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Not sure where you want to go with this, but the BofM does use archaic language quite a bit, and I don't think I'd say it's a lousy translation. I'd call it a masterful, eclectic translation that demonstrates philological expertise. Here I refer to the form and structure. In terms of the content, my currently preferred label is dynamic translation, moving between literal and free.

No. It's a lousy translation. One of the hallmarks of what we consider to be good translation is the avoidance of archaic language. Using archaic language is not "masterful, eclectic translation". It does not demonstrate philological expertise. Instead, it makes it difficult for the readers to actually understand what the original author intended.

As Lawrence Shapiro noted:

I see translation as the attempt to produce a text so transparent that it does not seem to be translated. A good translation is like a pane of glass. You only notice that it’s there when there are little imperfections—scratches, bubbles. Ideally, there shouldn’t be any. It should never call attention to itself.

Or Lawrence Venuti:

A translated text, whether prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction, is judged acceptable by most publishers, reviewers, and readers when it reads fluently, when the absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it seem transparent, giving the appearance that it reflects the foreign writer’s personality or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text—the appearance, in other words, that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the “original.” The illusion of transparency is an effect of fluent discourse, of the translator’s effort to insure easy readability by adhering to current usage, maintaining continuous syntax, fixing a precise meaning.

It is a good translation if it is translated into the current language at the time of translation. If the Book of Mormon is EME, then it is a good translation in the time period in which EME is used. But outside of that time period, it is no longer a good translation. It is a translation into archaic language, not well understood by its audience, and certainly drawing attention to itself. This is fine if its part of the meaning of the text-as-artifact - it becomes part of the rhetorical styling of the text overall, and impacts its meaning (as a translation). But, in terms of disguising the translator (which is the intent of good translations), not so much. We shouldn't have to read the Book of Mormon with a copy of the OED to help us understand it.

Ben McGuire

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1 hour ago, Brant Gardner said:

Parsimony. The revelations were not the result of translation, though certainly inspiration. Joseph's language improved after he was in contact with people from different locations and greater educational levels, but he still received revelations. Positing a non-Joseph source for the vocabulary makes it harder to explain the whole of Joseph's work. Positing Joseph as the source of language makes the changes in vocabulary and grammar over time logical.

I think you're stipulating here, Brant. You're insisting on essential conditions that lead to your desired outcome. And you have chosen to go against a large amount of philological work performed by independent linguists.

Actually, positing Joseph as the source for Book of Mormon vocabulary and grammar makes it very hard to explain its unprecedented archaic, extrabiblical usage. You need to explain how Joseph's idiolect maintained such usage to the age of 24, then didn't. What about everyone in his environment. Where is their archaic, extrabiblical usage? How about the writings of others in Palmyra and the vicinity? That is the first linguistic point to be investigated before considering "harder to explain" matters. Can someone grow up with a broadly archaic dialect that is different from King James idiom in many respects, and then shift in three years, after the age of 23? You will need to make the case that his idiolect was strangely archaic and could have dramatically shifted in three years. I don't think I could make that case.

You hold that core features of Joseph's grammar shifted between the summer of 1829 and the summer of 1832, when he penned his 1832 History, which clearly lacks at least three important features of BofM usage. That is a rather extreme linguistic position that is most likely wrong. Joseph had already met and worked with different people from different educational backgrounds before 1829. Of course he married in early 1827 and before that and as a result of that he had already been exposed to a different circle of speakers. Emma's idiolect would have already influenced him to a degree. Did she also have all the archaisms and then lose them?

In addition to accepting that Joseph spoke with an exceedingly archaic, extra-biblical dialect, you must accept that Joseph's language didn't shift between January 1827 and June 1829, and then shifted between July 1829 and the summer of 1832. Did he maintain heavy use of non-emphatic, positive declarative periphrastic do and did between 1827 and 1829, and then shift to no use by 1832? Did he maintain heavy personal which use between 1827 and 1829, and then shift to heavy personal who by 1832? His early letters don't show the personal which usage of the BofM, which is archaic and unlike the Bible. Did he maintain the {-th} plural until the dictation ended and then stop using it? It's not in the somewhat archaic 1832 History, and I don't see it in his early letters, which have some singular {-th} usage.

Notice also that the point you like to make about the Smith family being saturated in biblical language actually argues against your position that Joseph worded the BofM. Too much vocabulary usage is different from biblical usage and a huge amount of syntax is different. In terms of vocabulary, there are dozens of slight differences in usage that show this, and they don't all involve obsolete lexis. For example, take "sore afraid", found 14 times in the KJB. First, the BofM never uses sore as an adverb, even though it is an obvious biblical usage. So it never has "sore afraid". Second, the BofM instead uses the striking phrase "exceeding fraid" four times, which so far is attested only in the 1600s, twice. Also, the syntax is unlike pseudo-biblical texts. It is broadly archaic and outshines them in many different ways in terms of archaism. For example, consider the present-tense system of the BofM. It has mixing of s and th verb endings, which is most like the 1600s but unlike the KJB, although nearby mixing can be found in the 1611 KJB at least once, in the Apocrypha. It has about 200 instances of the th plural, which is found throughout the EME period, but not clearly found in the KJB. It has non-emphatic do-periphrasis, which is a distinctly EME phenomenon, and very little of it is found in the KJB. And of course the past-tense system is strikingly different and archaic. Etc.

So Joseph being saturated in biblical language may explain the expert interweaving of KJB language in the BofM (but it was unlikely, because the intertextuality is too expert and independent in its application, although all the biblical phrasing is used), but saturation in biblical language fails to explain its extrabiblical vocabulary and grammar. Stan

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Ben, I do see philological expertise for specific reasons. I see many uncommon forms and structures from the past employed as well as various kinds of archaic usage. I see the th-plural they constraint at work. I see syntactically mediated verb agreement variation.

But anyway, what were the constraints of the translation? King James passages and phrasing. That seems to be the base.

If that is right, then you're saying a good translation would have been consistent King James grammar and vocabulary? What there is, extrabiblical EME -- makes it a lousy translation?

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The problem isn't about the construction. Having wonderful archaic language construction isn't what makes a good translation. What makes a good translation is the way that the text works for its intended audience. If the intended audience is a 19th century audience then using EME as the language base makes it a bad translation. If the intended audience was an audience completely fluent in EME, then using that EME could make a wonderful translation. Of course, most people in the 19th century were not completely fluent in EME, and we have been getting considerably less so ever since. Just as the King James translation has been losing popularity for over a century now to other translations using modern English.

Suppose (to oversimplify for the purpose of illustration), I suggest that early modern and modern English are two entirely different languages (I recognize that it is a flawed analogy but it will help illustrate the problem). If my target audience speaks Spanish, and my original text is in German, I am not going to produce a text in French (even if my target audience has a limited understanding of French). But this is akin to the outcome that you seem to be suggesting.

We know with some certainty that the text on the Gold Plates cannot be an exact analog to the language in the Book of Mormon - especially where the Book of Mormon uses long quotes from the King James text. So the fact that we have these (near) verbatim sections of the the Book of Mormon indicates a textual reliance in the Book of Mormon on the King James version of the Bible, and not some nearly identical independent translation of a text that is related to, but certainly not identical to the sources used by the translators of the King James.

My position is that Joseph Smith is (a) a reader of the text - and that he should not be identified as a translator in any strict sense of the term. That (b) the archaic language is used to help the primary audience (those contemporary with its publication including Joseph Smith) understand the text as a translation - not just because it claims to be a translation, but because it has a distinct stylized feel to it. That (c) this use of the King James language in particular (where it is reliant on the King James text) creates a textual mechanism in which most of its primary readers would recognize biblical texts from their citations, allusions, and reinscriptions in the Book of Mormon. And these points lead me to the conclusion that the use of the archaic language in places is a deliberate case of translationese used rhetorically as a way of encouraging a certain perspective of the text and its contents for its first readers.

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So you're saying that if it works for the audience, it's ultimately a good translation (which overrides the usual requirement that it be in the audience's primary language)?

If by (a) you mean that words were transmitted somehow to Joseph, then yes.

So why was a lot of non - King James archaic grammar (morphology, syntax, the verbal system, etc.) used in the translation?  Why not a translation that closely matched King James idiom? If that's your (b) above, then could you reword.

Yes, there is some translationese type language, and also creative implementation of various forms and structures.

BTW, there are more than 800 word or constituent modifications to lengthier King James passages, with only about 20% of them involving italics.  Yes, it relies on the King James text heavily, but it has nearly a thousand modifications to King James passages.

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So you're saying that if it works for the audience, it's ultimately a good translation (which overrides the usual requirement that it be in the audience's primary language)?

Isn't this what the purpose of translating is? To convey meaning from one language to another - that is, from an author in one language to a reader in another language? It certainly isn't simply picking up a text and using a dictionary to try and move that text from one language to another. This is why good translations aren't rigidly tied to the source in terms of dictionary meaning - why they work to strip out idioms that do not work from the source culture, and work to make the text fit the needs of the readers in the destination culture and language. Primary language is important (it is, after all, why the Book of Mormon is largely in English right?). But, EME isn't really the English that Joseph Smith spoke (which is why we distinguish between EME and modern English right?). You have made this point numerous times. So I end up asking you this question? Why does Joseph Smith get a book that he cannot read very well? And not only Joseph Smith - the popularity of the KJV itself helps the language persist in certain contexts, right? But, that popularity began to decline at the end of the 19th century - as soon as alternatives were widely available. So if Joseph Smith receives the text of the Book of Mormon (and in this context, the question of how isn't too important), why doesn't come in contemporary English?

But let's get back to the issue of the text.

What percentage of the text would you say is made up of grammar (morphology, syntax, the verbal system, etc.) that was archaic in 1830, and what percentage of the text is made of grammar that wasn't archaic in 1830? How much of the grammatical structure of the text is more recent than EME? Of the vocabulary, how many words do you think post-date EME in their usage?

In terms of my point (b), I unsuccessfully (or incompletely) was pointing out the fact that texts have much greater room to impact society and culture as a translation. That is, the Book of Mormon has a much greater impact on its audience as a translation than it would have had as an original piece of literature produced by Joseph Smith (even an inspired piece literature). By using idiosyncratic language, the Book of Mormon doesn't just claim to be a translation, it presents itself as one - and this encourages its audience to read it as one (and more easily adopt change suggested by the text).

The King James language is only a part of this, and serves another function. After all, it's not too hard to look at Jacob 1:7 and see Psalm 95:

Wherefore we labored diligently among our people, that we might persuade them to come unto Christ, and partake of the goodness of God, that they might enter into his rest, lest by any means he should swear in his wrath they should not enter in, as in the provocation in the days of temptation while the children of Israel were in the wilderness.

To day if ye will hear his voice, Harden not your heart, as in the provocation, and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness: When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my work. Forty years long was I grieved with this generation, and said, It is a people that do err in their heart, and they have not known my ways: Unto whom I sware in my wrath that they should not enter into my rest.

Or to see Genesis 3 in 2 Nephi 2. On the other hand, it's a little harder to look at Jacob 2:24 and see Deuteronomy 17:17. Or read Deut. 17:20 in Jacob 2:13. When the Book of Mormon doesn't use the King James language when referring us to an Old Testament text, the connections are less obvious. We still do this sort of thing from time to time (in non-Book of Mormon contexts). I have a few different copies of English translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls. When they present biblical texts, there is always a decision to be made. Do you use a standard translation (the KJV is the favorite) for the material that is identical to the traditional text to offset the changes? I have translations that do this. Or do you put in an apparatus to help point out to the non-specialist reader where the textual differences are due to manuscript differences, and where they are simply due to translator preference. What does the Book of Mormon do?

As I said earlier, the sources used to construct the King James translation are quite different from the texts available to Lehi. And then we get translational overlays (Hebrew - brass plates [Egyptian?] - reformed Egyptian - English). So what we end up with in the Book of Mormon cannot possible be construed as some sort of literal word-for-word translation of the material on the Gold Plates. Nearly a thousand minor differences isn't really nearly enough to make any sort of difference here. The ratio of things that are kept the same to things that are changed is just really high. Whatever the reasons for the changes, the text is the way it is because of the King James text. There is clear reliance. (I note in passing that this is especially true for parts of the text where the King James translation is more than a little questionable). The King James text as a whole isn't particularly spectacular (as a translation of the original Hebrew). And the Book of Mormon's use of the King James language does seem at times to be rather arbitrary. This tends to reinforce the idea that this language is about helping the readers of the Book of Mormon, and is far less about producing some sort of word-for-word accurate translation of what was on the Gold Plates.

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1 hour ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

What percentage of the text would you say is made up of grammar (morphology, syntax, the verbal system, etc.) that was archaic in 1830, and what percentage of the text is made of grammar that wasn't archaic in 1830? How much of the grammatical structure of the text is more recent than EME? Of the vocabulary, how many words do you think post-date EME in their usage?

To quantify these with confidence is difficult, to say the least, even in the case of vocabulary, although that should be easier than grammar.  Royal has been methodically going through vocabulary and phrases of late, and I go over it all.  But it's a blur at this point.  He's written up hundreds of items but hasn't categorized them yet.  That process will clarify things.  I'd say there are a handful of vocabulary items that entered English in the 1700s.  (But should phrases be counted? Like plan of redemption/happiness/salvation/mercy. Plan of redemption enters in the late 1600s, the others in the first half of the 1700s. ECCO is a good database for these.) There are a handful of vocabulary items whose last attestation is before 1600. There are a handful of items that enter after 1700.  Most vocabulary was around before 1700 and persisted into the 1800s.  A lot of BofM vocabulary is in the KJB. Most of it is obvious. Some of it is not obvious or common.  A few are rare.  There are a few dozen that are listed as archaic or obsolete by the OED and not found in the KJB.  Some of this lexical usage we find later than the OED currently has them. Take rebellion = 'opposition'.  We found it in the 1600s yesterday.  Maybe it's in the 1700s.  The OED has it with a much earlier date. In summary, vocabulary on the extreme ends is a very small percentage. Archaic extrabiblical is not as low, but quite low. Archaic uncommon biblical is another category, etc.  I don't have figures right now, but these categories will be low. Taken together, the archaic extrabiblical is appreciable.

How to quantify grammar that was archaic in 1830? Biblical or extrabiblical. There are so many things that could be counted. Even with a part-of-speech tagged text it will be difficult. One could say that because 30% of past-tense lexical verbs exhibit non-emphatic, positive declarative did-periphrasis -- the overall past-tense system is archaic and extrabiblical, or you could say that it is 30% minus the low biblical rate. So there is systematic usage like that, and then there is trying to figure out a percentage for various noteworthy individual instances of systematic usage, and then there are many things that don't reach the level of systematic. There are about 200 instances of the th plural, almost all 3pl, so we could count all cases of the present-tense 3pl and get a percentage. I really don't know what that might be. Do-periphrasis is probably somewhere between 5% and 10%.

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15 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

How do we deal with a translation that seems to interpret an historical text into an early 19th century context (part of what we would expect with a fluent translation made in the early 19th century)?

Can you give some examples of this?

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On 6/6/2017 at 7:14 PM, Brant Gardner said:

There is no reason not to look, but it will be hard to find correspondences. I am reminded of Richard Bushman who thought he would go through the Book of Mormon and show how it supported an American-style government for the country's bicentennial. He expected to find it, but when he looked closely, it wasn't similar to that at all. 

My personal examination of the elements of the text show the closest cultural and historical connections to the times indicated in the Book of Mormon and Mesoamerica. The largest collection of those is in my Traditions of the Fathers book, but you will find many things online that were FairMormon or BMAF presentations--and are free.

I've been very interested in the correspondences you've found in Meso-America. But without other proposals to compare them against it's hard for me to gauge the strength of your overall argument. Part of my motivation for starting this thread was to challenge both believers and critics to build a case (or at least give me some ideas to think about) for how, where, and when the Book of Mormon came to be without being limited to JS's environment. Obviously if we expand the potential time frame by a couple of hundred years and add a continent to the equation we likewise expand the potential number of models. If the correspondences you've found are merely coincidental then presumably an alternative proposal could be developed that would be as good a fit or better. 

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Much of the grammar in the Book of Mormon is certainly archaic for the 1820s—in the sense that people then would not have accepted it as being in accordance with their contemporary grammar. But does this mean that the people of the 1820s had never heard or read such grammar? I find that harder to believe. Many people today can recite Shakespearean or Biblical passages that no-one would naturally utter today. People know it and know what it means, even though it is definitely archaic.

So as not to be disingenuous I admit that I am a non-Mormon skeptic who tends to suppose that Joseph Smith could very well have written the Book of Mormon as a deliberate but imperfect exercise in false archaism, using forms of speech that were known in his day as archaic forms even though they were never used in spontaneous speech. But just as suggestion within the logic of the Mormon discussion, it seems to me that there could be a very good reason for a divine translation to be deliberately archaic, even at the cost of making the translated text somewhat harder to understand for the target audience. Namely: the original Hebraic language of the source text might have been archaic for the time in which it was written.

This might well have occurred, it seems to me, if Jewish emigrants tried to preserve written Hebrew over centuries of linguistic change, like Irish monks faithfully writing on through the Dark Ages in Latin. The original scribes who produced the golden plates might then have been writing in what was for them an archaic Hebrew. The original language of the plates might perhaps even have been a semi-archaic scribal dialect that was never spoken by ordinary people at any time, and that featured inconsistent and imperfect combinations of evolved and archaic language.

To render such a peculiar form of Hebrew into an English that mixed several different epochs of grammar and vocabulary might then be a spectacularly faithful translation that captured the flavor and texture of the original more accurately than any fluent translation would have done.

I repeat, for the sake of honesty, that I don't buy that scenario myself. I don't see anything wrong with the logic of it, however, given Mormon premises, so I offer it in case anyone here finds it useful.

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I wonder if Oliver or any of the other scribes ever stopped Joseph and said, " you know , Joseph, nobody talks like that any more, "  or ever corrected the words as said by changing a  " John and me went to the store " to" John and I ... " without consulting Joseph. From the little explanations we have, such does not appear to be to case.  

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