Book of Mormon text analysis -- computer study idea

[churchistrue]

Royal Skousen has the idea that the BOM translation was done in the 16th century.  I'm a database/analytics guy by trade, and I have been wanting to see a study like this.  I think this kind of study would be a pretty decent shot at determining when the Book of Mormon was translated/written.  The theory would be that KJV can be imitated, but if you toss out everything that matches with the KJV, and throw out any BOM specific proper names, and then take the most frequent 4-5 n-grams.  Take those and take the data from the google n-gram chart producer here:  https://books.google.com/ngrams.  Then combine like the top 50 or 100 or  200 or whatever n-grams that are unique to BOM and see where google ngrams says the year that it would most likely be produced.  What do you think?  What's the problems with that kind of study.  I'm sure there are better sources for ngrams, especially the older periods that coincide with Old English.  Are any of those databases available to public?

 

[cdowis]

How about simply making a comparison to the Geneva Bible, specifically where it differs from the KJV.  I assume that the ultimate goal. is to find the source of the language of the BOM translation.

I think the Geneva Bible is a good place to start.

Edited October 13, 2016 by cdowis

[Brant Gardner]

The specific version of early modern English posited is post KJV (per personal communication with Stanford Carmack who is collaborating with Royal Skousen on the grammar). In their FairMormon presentation, I believe in the Q&A session, and I believe it was Stanford, admitted that there was modification of the language post the time period for most of the grammatical structures they found.

I have seen a statement from Colby Townsend that he has been able to identify a particular version of the KJV. I haven't yet tracked that version down to know what its publication date was.

On the question of methodology, I think what I am saying is that this is very complex and that the statistical analysis will certainly say something, but may or may not say anything that helps sort out the confusion unless some of these other questions are answered.

[cdowis]

I love knowledge and solving mysteries, bu I just see this as a rabbit hole where this one will not lead us to anything significant regarding the translation process or an understanding of the book itself.  Just a minor footnote in some scholarly journal.

But I could be wrong.....  critics will discover that someone's wife's brother had a copy of this special copy of the KJV sitting on their shelf within 50 miles of Palmyra and ...............

Edited October 14, 2016 by cdowis

[Robert F. Smith]

5 hours ago, cdowis said:

How about simply making a comparison to the Geneva Bible, specifically where it differs from the KJV.  I assume that the ultimate goal. is to find the source of the language of the BOM translation.

I think the Geneva Bible is a good place to start.

 

2 hours ago, Brant Gardner said:

The specific version of early modern English posited is post KJV (per personal communication with Stanford Carmack who is collaborating with Royal Skousen on the grammar). In their FairMormon presentation, I believe in the Q&A session, and I believe it was Stanford, admitted that there was modification of the language post the time period for most of the grammatical structures they found.

I have seen a statement from Colby Townsend that he has been able to identify a particular version of the KJV. I haven't yet tracked that version down to know what its publication date was.

.................................................................

I understand that the most popular Bible in Colonial America was the 1539 Great Bible (Cromwell's Bible, Cranmer's Bible,etc.) which had the formal approval of Henry VIII.  The 1611 KJV went through a series of editions, especially in 1769, and thousands of minor changes were made, so that the different editions are recognizable.  The particular KJV most readily available to Joseph Smith would have been the 1828 Phinney Bible published in Cooperstown, NY (with Apocrypha).  Indeed, that is the version later purchased by Oliver for use in making the inspired revision of the Bible.  It was that 1828 edition which I used in creating the apparatus criiticus for the FARMS Book of Mormon Critical Text back in 1984.  Colby Townsend's views on this matter focus on the italics and other variants in the 1769 and later editions, which are different from the earlier editions (https://archive.bookofmormoncentral.org/content/“behold-other-scriptures-i-would-ye-should-write”-malachi-book-mormon ).  However, each edition is unique unto itself, so that even more specific variants must be examined.  I discussed those variants in the second edition of my Book of Mormon Critical Text, 3 vols. (1986-1987), III:iv-v, available online at http://publications.mi.byu.edu/publications/PreliminaryReports/originalcriticaltextproject/Book of Mormon Critical Text 3.pdf .

Whether Carmack and Skousen would allow such a late adaptation is in serious question, as are the mechanics of such adaptations.  Early Modern English is simply too early and so many of the expressions and meanings were already obsolete by the time of Joseph Smith, that it does not seem credible to posit the main translation having been done so late.  An adaptation perhaps, but by whom?  Did Oliver and Joseph make such changes on the fly with a copy of the Phinney Bible at hand?  E. B. Grandin's bookstore was well-stocked with that edition.

[churchistrue]

Anyone aware of a table that breaks out chapters/verses of BOM into categories, ie war, sermon, Isaiah, etc?

 

 

[champatsch]

Unless you can get an n-gram comparison corpus that includes language from the eModE period (1470s [Caxton] to 1700) with spelling regularized, then you won't have a valid comparison. Matches will be overrepresented in the late modern period (1700 on) because of spelling regularity, and matches will be underrepresented earlier. That will lead one to conclude the language is more modern than it actually is.

This is a complex, detailed, technical field, and many people assert inaccurate things about it. Skousen and Carmack do not say that the translation was done in the 16th century or in the 17th century. They simply say that the Lord did it or had it done, and that we can find BofM language in the textual record both before the KJV (1611) and after the year 1611. And in some rare cases textual matching hasn't been found for some usage.  While the best fit for some of the language is the late 16th century, like past-tense usage, the best fit for other language is the 17th century.  And some old vocabulary usage that is rather transparent has last-dated attestation that is quite early.

Consider the BofM's archaic "more part" usage. The last book that is similar to the BofM in this regard is Holinshed's Chronicles (1577). The BofM is not biblical in its usage or pseudo-biblical or modern, but old.  And that happens time and time again. Take the 75 or so cases of dual object command syntax in the BofM (command X that X do something).  The last book that comes close to the BofM in this respect is Caxton's 1483 Golden Legend.  That was almost 350 years before the BofM, and yet there are linguistic features of the BofM that are found primarily in the 17th century, and some vocabulary like derangement appears to have entered English for the first time in the first half of the 18th century.

[champatsch]

I should add that the Google Books database is poor before 1700. One cannot perform reliable systematic research before the year 1700 from that database (that includes Ngram Viewer).  You have to go to EEBO.  And Old English is before the 12th century.  Then Middle English, then Early Modern English starting with printed books and Caxton.

[RevTestament]

16 hours ago, champatsch said:

Consider the BofM's archaic "more part" usage. The last book that is similar to the BofM in this regard is Holinshed's Chronicles (1577). The BofM is not biblical in its usage or pseudo-biblical or modern, but old.  And that happens time and time again. Take the 75 or so cases of dual object command syntax in the BofM (command X that X do something).  The last book that comes close to the BofM in this respect is Caxton's 1483 Golden Legend.  That was almost 350 years before the BofM, and yet there are linguistic features of the BofM that are found primarily in the 17th century, and some vocabulary like derangement appears to have entered English for the first time in the first half of the 18th century.

I've always just considered that the Lord used Biblical language familiar to the English people.

"More parte" is in the 1535 Coverdale Bible - Eccl 9:6, Acts 19:32, and Acts 27:12. http://www.studylight.org/desk/index.cgi?sr=0&old_q=ge+1&search_form_type=general&q1="more+part"&s=0&t1=en_mcb&ns=0  The 1611 KJV also had it in the Book of Mormon form of  "more part" in the same verses of Acts, and it is still there in our modern KJV used by the church. It is also in the Geneva Bible at Acts 19:32. Interesting stuff.

[sunstoned]

It seems large sections of the BoM are almost word for word taken from the KJV, complete with mistakes and all.  This, along with Occam's razor would suggest that there is a much simpler and more believable explanation to BoM origins than Skousen's fourteenth century ghost translation committee.

[cdowis]

9 minutes ago, sunstoned said:

It seems large sections of the BoM are almost word for word taken from the KJV, complete with mistakes and all.  This, along with Occam's razor would suggest that there is a much simpler and more believable explanation to BoM origins than Skousen's fourteenth century ghost translation committee.

Question:  What was on the original manuscript,and  the printer's manuscript for the Isaiah sections,  compared to the published text of the BOM?

[Glenn101]

22 minutes ago, sunstoned said:

It seems large sections of the BoM are almost word for word taken from the KJV, complete with mistakes and all.  This, along with Occam's razor would suggest that there is a much simpler and more believable explanation to BoM origins than Skousen's fourteenth century ghost translation committee.

I am sure that you have read or heard of the work that John A. Tvedtnes has done on Isaiah variants in the Book of Mormon. Isaiah is the author mostly quoted. According to Tvedtnes "Of the 478 verses in the Book of Mormon quoted from the book of Isaiah, 201 agree with the King James reading while 207 show variations." Now it is not unbelievable that Joseph could have memorized those verses from Isaiah. I have known people who studied the Bible and could quote whole chapters and maybe even complete books. What is surprising is when Joseph strayed from the KJV. Tvedtnes found a lot of support for those (but not all) variants in the various texts (Jewish Masoretic, Septuagint, Qumran, etc.). What does Occam's razor suggest for those variants?

What does Occam's Razor suggest for the information that champatsch has provided? It has been suggested that the fifteenth century English were frozen artifacts of backwater New England areas, but no one has provided any examples from the area and era. It is just dismissed.

Glenn

[Brant Gardner]

2 hours ago, Glenn101 said:

It has been suggested that the fifteenth century English were frozen artifacts of backwater New England areas, but no one has provided any examples from the area and era. It is just dismissed.

This is not quite an accurate synopsis of the problem. What has happened is that the hypothesis suggests that the Book of Mormon represents a version of English that became extinct. The Occam's Razor suggests that it was Joseph's dialect, so the hypothesis must discover evidence of the older English (not that difficult) and that it became extinct. There are to fronts on which that has been attempted, vocabulary and grammar. The problem is that the question of extinction is hard to demonstrate. Many of the vocabulary items suggested to have gone extinct are found pretty close to Joseph's time. That diminishes the probability that everything went extinct 20 years before--or even 40. 

Next, some of the grammatical items are found in the Joseph Smith papers.

Finally, I heard Carmack state in a Q&A and he and Skousen presented on grammar that there are things in the text that postdate the "extinction." 

So what we actually have is some evidence of persistence to Joseph's time of many elements. We have the problem of assessing aspects of an oral dialect by looking at examples from published texts. Then, we have the paucity of examples of Joseph's writing in his 1830 and earlier dialect. He clearly learned from his associations and his vocabulary and grammar shifted over time.

The evidence that the dialect of the translator retained many elements that had  be come non-standard by Joseph's time is pretty good and accurate. The problem lies in the suggestion that they could not have represented Joseph's dialect and that therefore there must have been a completely unattested and unknowable translator that lived perhaps a 100 years earlier than Joseph. I think will take a while to work out, but I suspect that the end of the process will return to Joseph as translator.

[Robert F. Smith]

5 hours ago, sunstoned said:

It seems large sections of the BoM are almost word for word taken from the KJV, complete with mistakes and all.  This, along with Occam's razor would suggest that there is a much simpler and more believable explanation to BoM origins than Skousen's fourteenth century ghost translation committee.

Do you have a scholarly source which has made that systematic comparison?  And have you actually read the Carmack & Skousen work on the BofM as Early Modern English?  Occam's Razor is not fond of creating paradoxes nor of flouting reason.

[Glenn101]

8 hours ago, Brant Gardner said:

The evidence that the dialect of the translator retained many elements that had  be come non-standard by Joseph's time is pretty good and accurate. The problem lies in the suggestion that they could not have represented Joseph's dialect and that therefore there must have been a completely unattested and unknowable translator that lived perhaps a 100 years earlier than Joseph. I think will take a while to work out, but I suspect that the end of the process will return to Joseph as translator.

Thanks for your insights Brant. What I am awaiting is research on mundane texts, i.e. letters, diaries, etc. produced by others in the New England area to establish to some degree whether the unattested Early Modern English artifacts found in the Book of Mormon are also found in those type of texts. We do not need Joseph's works themselves to establish some sort of probability. If significant Early Modern English elements that Stanford and Royal have identified thus far in the Book of Mormon but not found in published texts of the era, the more likely that those elements were also a part of Joseph's lingual environment. However, if there is a paucity of such elements, then the situation becomes more murky.

Glenn

[Glenn101]

On 10/14/2016 at 7:32 PM, champatsch said:

Consider the BofM's archaic "more part" usage. The last book that is similar to the BofM in this regard is Holinshed's Chronicles (1577). The BofM is not biblical in its usage or pseudo-biblical or modern, but old.  And that happens time and time again. Take the 75 or so cases of dual object command syntax in the BofM (command X that X do something).  The last book that comes close to the BofM in this respect is Caxton's 1483 Golden Legend.  That was almost 350 years before the BofM, and yet there are linguistic features of the BofM that are found primarily in the 17th century, and some vocabulary like derangement appears to have entered English for the first time in the first half of the 18th century.

Has any research been done or contemplated on mundane texts such as letter, diaries, etc. in the New England area to determine if any of those artifacts of Early Modern English can be found?

Thanks,

Glenn

[sunstoned]

20 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Do you have a scholarly source which has made that systematic comparison?  And have you actually read the Carmack & Skousen work on the BofM as Early Modern English?  Occam's Razor is not fond of creating paradoxes nor of flouting reason.

You are right Robert.  I probably should with hold judgement until more research is done. I will wait and see what responses are generated when Skousen publishes his latest BoM translation research a peer reviewed journal.  Do you have any idea when that is going to happen?

[Robert F. Smith]

6 minutes ago, sunstoned said:

You are right Robert.  I probably should with hold judgement until more research is done. I will wait and see what responses are generated when Skousen publishes his latest BoM translation research a peer reviewed journal.  Do you have any idea when that is going to happen?

You can read Carmack's series of brilliant articles in Interpreter, if you dare.  I have placed them on this board a couple of times already, and will again if you promise to read them before commenting further.

[James Tunney]

1 hour ago, Robert F. Smith said:

You can read Carmack's series of brilliant articles in Interpreter, if you dare.  I have placed them on this board a couple of times already, and will again if you promise to read them before commenting further.

I have a hard time with the pre-translation theory for many reasons.  First of all, why all the steps to get the modern book of mormon?  If you as a parent want to communicate to your children, it seems that you would directly communicate to them and not have all the messengers in between.  The chances for error increase with each step.  In fact, there were major changes that had to be done after Joseph Smith got his version from the pre-translators, such as changing God to Son of God and changing Benjamin to Mosiah. Also, why wouldn't God give Joseph a finished product that wouldn't require over 3000 changes?  How are all the errors and changes accounted for?  It seems from God's prospective, it surely wasn't an efficient enterprise. 

[Robert F. Smith]

2 minutes ago, James Tunney said:

I have a hard time with the pre-translation theory for many reasons.  First of all, why all the steps to get the modern book of mormon?  If you as a parent want to communicate to your children, it seems that you would directly communicate to them and not have all the messengers in between.  The chances for error increase with each step.  In fact, there were major changes that had to be done after Joseph Smith got his version from the pre-translators, such as changing God to Son of God and changing Benjamin to Mosiah. Also, why wouldn't God give Joseph a finished product that wouldn't require over 3000 changes?  How are all the errors and changes accounted for?  It seems from God's prospective, it surely wasn't an efficient enterprise. 

You're going to tell us what God's perspective is, James?  And you claim that all those changes were "required"?  Skousen and I don't think so, and they were not in fact "errors."  The "major changes" you point to were not needed at all, and were not even consistent in most cases.  As usual, when your premises are wrong, so are your conclusions.  You can make the same sort of irrational claims about the KJV and all of its editions and tens of thousands of changes, but to what purpose?

On the other hand, I have no logical explanation (don't know anyone who does) for the Early Modern English in the BofM.  It seems like "a riddle wrapped in an enigma," but I don't think of it as a "pre-translation theory."  Not even sure what that means.

[James Tunney]

13 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

You're going to tell us what God's perspective is, James?  And you claim that all those changes were "required"?  Skousen and I don't think so, and they were not in fact "errors."  The "major changes" you point to were not needed at all, and were not even consistent in most cases.  As usual, when your premises are wrong, so are your conclusions.  You can make the same sort of irrational claims about the KJV and all of its editions and tens of thousands of changes, but to what purpose?

On the other hand, I have no logical explanation (don't know anyone who does) for the Early Modern English in the BofM.  It seems like "a riddle wrapped in an enigma," but I don't think of it as a "pre-translation theory."  Not even sure what that means.

Couldnt the Early Modern English be there because Joseph Smith wanted his invention to sound more scriptural? Also, maybe someone is seeing Early Modern English that isnt there? 

Do you think Joseph should not have changed God to Son of God? Or Benjamin to Mosiah? If he shouldnt have changed it, why did he? The Benjamin to Mosiah had to be changed to make sense, right?

[Glenn101]

1 hour ago, James Tunney said:

Couldnt the Early Modern English be there because Joseph Smith wanted his invention to sound more scriptural? Also, maybe someone is seeing Early Modern English that isnt there? 

Do you think Joseph should not have changed God to Son of God? Or Benjamin to Mosiah? If he shouldnt have changed it, why did he? The Benjamin to Mosiah had to be changed to make sense, right?

James, it would help your understanding of the situation if you would read the articles by Stanford Carmack, if you have not already done so. If the Early Modern English that Stanford has determined to have become "extinct" cannot be found in Joseph Smith's lingual environment, what do you think the odds are that he could have somehow bumbled and fumbled and accidentally reproduced them?

Glenn

[James Tunney]

18 minutes ago, Glenn101 said:

James, it would help your understanding of the situation if you would read the articles by Stanford Carmack, if you have not already done so. If the Early Modern English that Stanford has determined to have become "extinct" cannot be found in Joseph Smith's lingual environment, what do you think the odds are that he could have somehow bumbled and fumbled and accidentally reproduced them?

Glenn

How do you propose to eliminate early modern english from Joseph Smith's environment? Old bibles were still floating around at that time. How are we sure early modern english is even there? Has a non-mormon linguist confirmed it? Has this theory been vetted in a peer reviewed journal? Is it just in the interpreter?

 

[Brant Gardner]

7 hours ago, James Tunney said:

Couldnt the Early Modern English be there because Joseph Smith wanted his invention to sound more scriptural? Also, maybe someone is seeing Early Modern English that isnt there? 

Do you think Joseph should not have changed God to Son of God? Or Benjamin to Mosiah? If he shouldnt have changed it, why did he? The Benjamin to Mosiah had to be changed to make sense, right?

James, I get the feeling that you are tossing out objections without actually understanding any of the issues. The case for early modern English is that although Joseph certainly could (and did) use language that was intended to sound more scriptural, there are vocabulary and grammatical elements that represented a version of English that preceded the KJV. So yes, you are right, but no--that argument says nothing about the topic of early modern English.

Second, the two changes you are talking about were made so that the text made more sense to us. In both cases, the original actually made sense as it was--but required understanding of the text that readers hadn't done at the time. Changes were made so that it was easier to understand--similar to the way that the grammatical forms of early modern English that we see as grammatical errors were changed to be less jarring for the reader. In some ways, we get a better understanding of the ancient authors when we restore those readings.

[Brant Gardner]

5 hours ago, James Tunney said:

How do you propose to eliminate early modern english from Joseph Smith's environment? Old bibles were still floating around at that time. How are we sure early modern english is even there? Has a non-mormon linguist confirmed it? Has this theory been vetted in a peer reviewed journal? Is it just in the interpreter?

I get the impression you have read a lot more critical arguments than of the actual issues. In this case, you have trotted out the "vetted in a peer reviewed journal" without having any idea whether it is relevant. First, early modern English is certainly a well accepted discussion in linguistic history, and the topic is easily available in non-LDS peer reviewed journals. Secondly, the application of the information to the Book of Mormon is non-controversial. It is descriptive, not interpretive. 

"Has a non-Mormon linguist confirmed it?" That question, by itself, shows that you have no clue what the issue is or what the data represent. Again, the data are descriptive. If you took that information to any linguist familiar with, in this case, the grammar of early modern English, they would recognize the presence of the older forms. The data are clear, and actually pretty uncontroversial. The interpretation of what it means can be controversial, and you might notice that I disagree with that interpretation. However, the data are clear and your question simply repeating issues that keep getting repeated--and in this case, are completely irrelevant to the issue you are trying to use them against.