19th century phrases in the BOM -- especially for the EModE'ers

[Stargazer]

12 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

 

This is somewhat over the top, stemelbow.

Well, perhaps so, but I enjoyed it!  I do have a wacky sense of humor. I wonder if God laughs at our jokes sometimes?

[Stargazer]

12 hours ago, stemelbow said:

I wonder if Jesus just assigned the task to some character who grew up in 15th century English speakers, but had also been listening and interacting with English speakers who were arriving to the heavenly realms as he was taking a couple hundred years to get a story that one day he'll make appear, line by line, in a stone that he had to figure out how to get into some 19th century american's hands. 

That has an interesting ring to it.  Although I doubt this is how it happened.

Quote

This character:  "Sir, I don't know why these folks went through the trouble of keep a record and hiding it, if it wasn't going to be translated"

Man upstairs:  "don't worry about it.  My gosh, if I was worried about getting accurate history, a word for word accounting, I would have done the whole bible different.  There's nothing foolproof here.  You are all mistake prone.  So get at it.  You'll make plenty of mistakes as everyone before.  It doesn't matter because it's a story, ideas put out there.  Let them figure it out.  they'll fail and fall all over themselves.  Just do it.  You know enough true stuff.  Just tell them the mistakes the mistakes of men."

Character:  "can I hire a few to help?"

"sure.  Take whoever you want.  They ain't busy or nothing trying to convert the dead." 

That's actually rather amusing. I can just picture it, actually.

Did you ever see the film "Oh God!" starring John Denver and George Burns?  This little vignette of yours reminded me of it.

Edited November 10, 2017 by Stargazer

[Stargazer]

11 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

The idea that the plates were available to and translated by someone like Dr. John Dee (1527-1608; astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I) does seem odd, but he did have an Aztec seerstone (which is now in the British Museum). There is even a book of Enoch attributed to him (also in the British Museum Library).  We sometimes think that everything began with Joseph Smith.  It didn't.

As for rocks being seerstones (as for John Dee), we could have laughed at that back in the day, but we now use fancy looking rocks (solid state) as electronic communication devices which could perform exactly the function described for Joseph's seerstone.  A sense of perspective might help here.

That's a very interesting notion!  That seerstone in the Church archives could actually be a giant integrated circuit with subspace communications and holographic projection capability!  

[Stargazer]

4 hours ago, phaedrus ut said:

If the translation was using Joseph's language why did the rock need to be in a hat "so as to exclude the light"? 

That's clearly because the holographic projector installed in the stone was low-powered. And since the projector was integral to the stone's motherboard, which had no expanion slots, apparently, it couldn't be upgraded to a higher lumen projector.

Seriously, why do I have to explain this?  It should be obvious!

This particular instance of seer stone is distinguished from those twelve stones that the Brother of Jared had, which didn't have to emit coherent images, but just illumination. Thus the power requirements differed considerably -- and they were, in point of fact, inside those vessels, which naturally excluded light.  Although, I would have thought that the subspace power transmission interlock might have been able to provide more joules of energy than it clearly did. Perhaps the coupling frequencies were out of phase due to some other gobbledegook phrase I'm having a hard time coming up with right now. Although the phrase "Jimjamming the Framistan" comes to mind.

 

Edited November 10, 2017 by Stargazer

[Stargazer]

2 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Dee's seerstone was made from obsidian by the Aztecs, which is why it could be used as a mirror (it was called "The Devil's Looking Glass: The Magical Speculum of Dr. John Dee"), and Mesoamerican priests and shamans regularly used such stones, right up to the present day, to predict the future and to heal.  They are called zaztun in Maya language -- see the photo and description in National Geographic, 148/6 (Dec 1975), 746-747.

The glyphs lead nowhere and are not similar to the so-called "Anthon Transcript."

How about the Voynich Manuscript? I've heard that some scholar has come up with some decoding:

http://www.medievalists.net/2014/02/voynich-manuscript-partially-decoded-text-hoax-scholar-finds/

 

[Stargazer]

2 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Because he was reading an LED screen, and one cannot see that in lighted areas.

Well, my room is quite light at the moment, and I can see my LED screen quite well.

As I said, the power source in the stone was limited.  And I'm pretty sure it was a holographic projector -- not just a screen.

[Robert F. Smith]

7 hours ago, Stargazer said:

How about the Voynich Manuscript? I've heard that some scholar has come up with some decoding:

http://www.medievalists.net/2014/02/voynich-manuscript-partially-decoded-text-hoax-scholar-finds/

Comparisons have been made, but those non-Mormons who take such glyphs seriously pooh pooh such claims.

[Robert F. Smith]

7 hours ago, Stargazer said:

Well, perhaps so, but I enjoyed it!  I do have a wacky sense of humor. I wonder if God laughs at our jokes sometimes?

God  does have a sense of humor, and sometimes it is cunning and sharp -- I having been on the receiving end of some of that humor.

[champatsch]

20 hours ago, stemelbow said:

So what percentage of the Book of Mormon contains Early Modern English versus 19th-century language?

No one would agree on any calculated percentage, since there are many ways to go about it.  Not terribly interesting, ultimately, to try to assign a percentage.  Here's what's interesting, and dispositive of the authorship question.  Simple, content-laden phraseology like "demands of justice", which was conceptually in the language well before 1650, doesn't determine the question of authorship (whether or not the research goes beyond the insufficient and naive).  The content-free verbal system (the core of grammar) determines the authorship question, and it is confirmed by archaic, extra-biblical lexical usage (or vice versa).  What do we read in the dictated original text?  A genuinely archaic, extra-biblical verbal system that shows implicit knowledge of Early Modern English syntax far beyond that of pseudo-biblical writings.  Based on these descriptive linguistic facts, we then know that Joseph Smith wasn't the English-language author.  Those who favor other explanations ultimately must choose whether they will accede to this exceedingly strong evidence and use this fundamental reality as a basis for further analysis of a host of textual issues and studies.

[churchistrue]

22 minutes ago, champatsch said:

No one would agree on any calculated percentage, since there are many ways to go about it.  Not terribly interesting, ultimately, to try to assign a percentage.  Here's what's interesting, and dispositive of the authorship question.  Simple, content-laden phraseology like "demands of justice", which was conceptually in the language well before 1650, doesn't determine the question of authorship (whether or not the research goes beyond the insufficient and naive).  The content-free verbal system (the core of grammar) determines the authorship question, and it is confirmed by archaic, extra-biblical lexical usage (or vice versa).  What do we read in the dictated original text?  A genuinely archaic, extra-biblical verbal system that shows implicit knowledge of Early Modern English syntax far beyond that of pseudo-biblical writings.  Based on these descriptive linguistic facts, we then know that Joseph Smith wasn't the English-language author.  Those who favor other explanations ultimately must choose whether they will accede to this exceedingly strong evidence and use this fundamental reality as a basis for further analysis of a host of textual issues and studies.

I think the reason it could be important is to somehow come up with some sort of probability model to determine what is most likely. What I hear you saying is that you have ruled out the possibility of 19c authorship, so it matters not how improbable any other points are for 16c authorship. I think where stemelbow and I have gone in this thread with this line of questioning is to determine if there are 19c  aspects that line up to point making 16c authorship improbable. And how improbable? And how extensive? I don't know if this is the case. I haven't done the study. But if there is extensive and overwhelming evidence of 19c authorship, that could get to a point where it overrides the low probability of a 19c author properly using the 16c grammar such that 19c authorship becomes the more plausible theory. Do you see a possibility of these 19c aspects reaching that level?

19c implausibility: using the 16c grammar and vocabularly correctly

16c implausibility: lots of 19c stuff in it

Could the 19c stuff ever get to be so overwhelming, we accept the 16c grammar implausibility?

 

 

 

 

[Glenn101]

28 minutes ago, churchistrue said:

Could the 19c stuff ever get to be so overwhelming, we accept the 16c grammar implausibility?

Is the 19c stuff unique to the 19c or just more prevalent?

[Pete Ahlstrom]

1 hour ago, champatsch said:

No one would agree on any calculated percentage, since there are many ways to go about it.  Not terribly interesting, ultimately, to try to assign a percentage.  Here's what's interesting, and dispositive of the authorship question.  Simple, content-laden phraseology like "demands of justice", which was conceptually in the language well before 1650, doesn't determine the question of authorship (whether or not the research goes beyond the insufficient and naive).  The content-free verbal system (the core of grammar) determines the authorship question, and it is confirmed by archaic, extra-biblical lexical usage (or vice versa).  What do we read in the dictated original text?  A genuinely archaic, extra-biblical verbal system that shows implicit knowledge of Early Modern English syntax far beyond that of pseudo-biblical writings.  Based on these descriptive linguistic facts, we then know that Joseph Smith wasn't the English-language author.  Those who favor other explanations ultimately must choose whether they will accede to this exceedingly strong evidence and use this fundamental reality as a basis for further analysis of a host of textual issues and studies.

Have you compared the book of mormon manuscript to the english dialect spoken by Joseph Smith?  If so, please point me to where I might read your work.

[churchistrue]

10 minutes ago, Glenn101 said:

Is the 19c stuff unique to the 19c or just more prevalent?

I think both would probably be important. If the "more prevalent" was significant. For example, If you wrote a few sentences full of slang from very recent times, but each one of these vocabulary and phrase existed previously, just with much less frequency, that would be relevant to consider in determining if that was from 1950 or 2017.

 

[Ryan Dahle]

1 hour ago, churchistrue said:

19c implausibility: using the 16c grammar and vocabularly correctly

16c implausibility: lots of 19c stuff in it

Could the 19c stuff ever get to be so overwhelming, we accept the 16c grammar implausibility?

I don't think this is really an issue of prevalence in the sense of 19th century content versus 16th century content. It is much more about the explicability of the EModE content, no matter how it matches up proportionally to the 19th century content. This is because the EModE theory can accommodate even disproportionately large amounts of 19th century content very easily, and it can do so no matter if that content is defined by exclusivity or predominate usage rates.

So the only pertinent question is at what point the presence of EModE features become highly unlikely or inexplicable for the theory that Joseph used his native and intuitive linguistic framework to produce the English text of the Book of Mormon. 

Edited November 10, 2017 by Ryan Dahle

[hope_for_things]

4 hours ago, churchistrue said:

I think the reason it could be important is to somehow come up with some sort of probability model to determine what is most likely. What I hear you saying is that you have ruled out the possibility of 19c authorship, so it matters not how improbable any other points are for 16c authorship. I think where stemelbow and I have gone in this thread with this line of questioning is to determine if there are 19c  aspects that line up to point making 16c authorship improbable. And how improbable? And how extensive? I don't know if this is the case. I haven't done the study. But if there is extensive and overwhelming evidence of 19c authorship, that could get to a point where it overrides the low probability of a 19c author properly using the 16c grammar such that 19c authorship becomes the more plausible theory. Do you see a possibility of these 19c aspects reaching that level?

19c implausibility: using the 16c grammar and vocabularly correctly

16c implausibility: lots of 19c stuff in it

Could the 19c stuff ever get to be so overwhelming, we accept the 16c grammar implausibility?

What happens when a 19c century farm boy with little formal education dictates a script that he's intentionally trying to make sound ancient?  We've already established KJV dependency in many parts of the book, but what do we do with those pesky elements that sound extra biblical, and that contain older than 19c syntax & grammar?  

Is it possible that Joseph's dictation mirrored some language that had pretty much died out in the general population by the 19c, but that followed older 15c & 16c conventions?  If so, how could he have done this?  Is it possible that he was exposed to some older books written in the 15c & 16c and that the grammar styles of those writings influenced Joseph's attempts to dictate a book with an older English sound to it?

Any thoughts?  

[hope_for_things]

2 minutes ago, hope_for_things said:

What happens when a 19c century farm boy with little formal education dictates a script that he's intentionally trying to make sound ancient?  We've already established KJV dependency in many parts of the book, but what do we do with those pesky elements that sound extra biblical, and that contain older than 19c syntax & grammar?  

Is it possible that Joseph's dictation mirrored some language that had pretty much died out in the general population by the 19c, but that followed older 15c & 16c conventions?  If so, how could he have done this?  Is it possible that he was exposed to some older books written in the 15c & 16c and that the grammar styles of those writings influenced Joseph's attempts to dictate a book with an older English sound to it?

Any thoughts?  

What about something like Paradise Lost by Milton published in 1667, I've read that this book was more widely read than the Bible in some circles, and its ideas certainly had a large and influential impact on Christian thinking.  Does some of the 15c & 16c phrasing show up in Milton's work?  Odd coincidence is Milton went blind and had to dictate the text of Paradise lost to scribes.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost

There is Swedenborg's writings from the 1700s, many believe were influential on Joseph's conception of the three degrees of glory.  Do any of his writings have elements of grammar and syntax from 15c and 16c works.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Swedenborg

I hope these questions aren't dumb, just throwing these ideas out there.  

[Ryan Dahle]

2 hours ago, hope_for_things said:

Is it possible that Joseph's dictation mirrored some language that had pretty much died out in the general population by the 19c, but that followed older 15c & 16c conventions?  If so, how could he have done this?  Is it possible that he was exposed to some older books written in the 15c & 16c and that the grammar styles of those writings influenced Joseph's attempts to dictate a book with an older English sound to it?

Any thoughts? 

It's true that dialectic forms can sometimes elude the textual record. But we have to ask ourselves if it is really plausible to suppose that all of these EModE textual features didn't make it into the writings of Joseph's contemporaries. If we were simply looking at a few nonstandard words and phrases, your supposition might be more plausible. But the EModE content is simply too extensive and varied. Also, I believe Skousen (and maybe Carmack) have been looking for these EModE features in Joseph's immediate environment, I presume by sifting through personal documents that wouldn't be in the online databases.

The same problem arises with access to older books. The variations of EModE in the Book of Mormon can't just be found in a few old books. They are scattered throughout the textual record. 

 

1 hour ago, hope_for_things said:

What about something like Paradise Lost by Milton published in 1667, I've read that this book was more widely read than the Bible in some circles, and its ideas certainly had a large and influential impact on Christian thinking.  Does some of the 15c & 16c phrasing show up in Milton's work?  Odd coincidence is Milton went blind and had to dictate the text of Paradise lost to scribes.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost

There is Swedenborg's writings from the 1700s, many believe were influential on Joseph's conception of the three degrees of glory.  Do any of his writings have elements of grammar and syntax from 15c and 16c works.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Swedenborg

I hope these questions aren't dumb, just throwing these ideas out there.  

As for the comparison with Milton (or any of Joseph's 19th century contemporary authors), I recommend these readings:

Robert A. Rees, “John Milton, Joseph Smith, and the Book of Mormon,” BYU Studies Quarterly 54, no. 3 (2015) 6-18. 

Robert A. Rees, “Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, and the American Renaissance: An Update,” Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 19 (2016): 1-16.

Robert A. Rees, “Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, and the American Renaissance,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 35, no. 3 (2002): 83–112

As for Joseph's possible familiarity with Swedenborg, I think that first you would need to establish, beyond superficial parallels between their works, that there is some likelihood that Joseph read from Swedenborg. Did he own any of his works or mention anything about them directly? Yet even if we could make that link (I've never checked on it personally), then you would have to see how many of Swedenborg's writings contain anything like the EModE syntax. It's an interesting proposal, but I highly doubt there is much there, considering that Swedenborg's texts were surely in the databases that Skousen and Carmack sifted through. If there is something there, they probably already know about it and can tell you.

Edited November 11, 2017 by Ryan Dahle

[Robert F. Smith]

6 hours ago, churchistrue said:

I think the reason it could be important is to somehow come up with some sort of probability model to determine what is most likely. What I hear you saying is that you have ruled out the possibility of 19c authorship, so it matters not how improbable any other points are for 16c authorship. I think where stemelbow and I have gone in this thread with this line of questioning is to determine if there are 19c  aspects that line up to point making 16c authorship improbable. And how improbable? And how extensive? I don't know if this is the case. I haven't done the study. But if there is extensive and overwhelming evidence of 19c authorship, that could get to a point where it overrides the low probability of a 19c author properly using the 16c grammar such that 19c authorship becomes the more plausible theory. Do you see a possibility of these 19c aspects reaching that level?

19c implausibility: using the 16c grammar and vocabularly correctly

16c implausibility: lots of 19c stuff in it

Could the 19c stuff ever get to be so overwhelming, we accept the 16c grammar implausibility?

 

5 hours ago, churchistrue said:

I think both would probably be important. If the "more prevalent" was significant. For example, If you wrote a few sentences full of slang from very recent times, but each one of these vocabulary and phrase existed previously, just with much less frequency, that would be relevant to consider in determining if that was from 1950 or 2017.

You may be overlooking the strong presence in the Book of Mormon of phrases, vocabulary, and grammar which are standard Early Modern English, but which are extinct long before Joseph's day.  English language items which are present in both Early Modern and 19th century English are not diagnostic and must be set aside -- they provide no data on which to determine authorship -- and that is why prevalence in one period or the other is irrelevant.

[Scott Mitchell]

I think churchistrue and those with him who still cling to the Joseph-Smith-as-synthesizer-of-the-Book-of-Mormon theory, need to step back and consider this simple question of logic, and consider its implications for the question we're currently exploring: 

The Book of Mormon has been discovered to be shot through with pervasive Early Modern English grammar and expressions.  The two researchers who have discovered this are both eminent scholars in their fields; one  has a doctorate, and the other has two doctorates.  Neither scholar has encountered any disagreement from scholarly peers within or without Mormonism over their conclusions that the BoM text contains a heavy concentration of EME.  (In fact, because of the uniqueness of their discovery, they have no similarly qualified peers who combine knowledge of EME with BoM textual knowledge, and in fact, if peer review is to be conducted, which both these scholars welcome, it would have to come from those with doctorates in English or linguistic disciplines.)  Some of the BoM's EME is in the KJV and is still in use in the English-speaking world in 1829, but a huge amount of it is obsolete, isn't found in the KJV and is in fact spoken by NO ONE as of 1829.  In fact, when the obsolete EME is discovered throughout the BoM's original manuscript, no one recogognizes it as EME because no one interested in the subject, be they layman or scholar, is familiar with EME.  Furthermore, from 1830 when the BoM is published through this very day of 11/10/17, no person has ever argued or alleged that Joseph Smith or any of his contemporaries, including the biblically trained Sidney Rigdon, have ever used obsolete EME in any of their writings or speeches. 

There is other language in the BoM which doesn't appear to have originated in the era of EME, but the two scholars DON"T claim that all language in the BoM preceded the end of the EME era in approximately 1740.  What they do claim is that the BoM linguistic era  appears to have begun in the 15th century, 

We are now trying to figure out who could have originally produced the BoM text from among these candidates, since a question has arisen as to authorship.

--Joseph Smith, who speaks and reads English, but does NOT speak or read any OBSOLETE EME.  This person's knowledge of EME is limited to that EME which is still commonly used as of the 1820's.  Person J dictates the BoM to a scribe and it is published in 1830, but the text's linguistic form is so foreign to him that within seven years, he massively overhauls the text to eliminate all the expressions which he considers ungrammatical, misspelled or redundant.

Person(s) X, maybe alone, or maybe with others.  X is brilliant, extremely well read, obsessed with theology and determined to create a new book of scripture.  X reads the Bible voraciously,  attends sermons and writes down what he/she hears, reads all religious discourse available to him in libraries within a wide area of his/her home, reads newspaper accounts of sermons, and feels no compunctions against heavily borrowing from the writings and speeches of others in composing his/her own new scriptures.  X wants to weigh in on all the relevant hot-topics questions arising out of Christianity, and incorporate them into X's new scripture.  X produces a BoM text inspired by, and borrowed from, all the theological writings of the late 18th and the early 19th century that X has read, as well as X's incredible ability to compose a fictional history so prescient that it accurately predicts undiscovered places and future events. Despite X's extreme erudition, however, he doesn't write the BoM manuscript himself, but somehow provides the fabricated text to Joseph Smith in such a manner as to allow him to read its text by staring into an instrument in a hat.  When the BoM is published, X lies by representing it to be written by ancient prophets and translated by the gift and power of God.  X is completely unfamilar with obsolete EME, however, and never speaks or writes anything in EME before or after the BoM is published.  Somehow, though, the BoM turns out to be full of EME grammar and expressions.

--Persons (be they mortal or immortal) N,  who live through the era of EME, can read the writing on the plates, and dedicate themselves to learning the English writings of the EME era so well they can translate what's on the plates into EME, a language which Joseph Smith will still be able to read in 1829, though much of its form will seem strange to him.  N works on this project throughout the EME era, and beyond it, stopping only a few decades before the BoM translation project begins.  N is or are ultimately responsible for providing the text which through God's power is later read shining forth from the instrument provided for that purpose.

Is it hard to see that, even if you believe in the possible existence of Person(s) X, neither Joseph Smith nor X could have produced the BoM text, because of that one stubborn fact that neither one of them had any familiarity with EME?  In this context, does it make any sense to argue for a study of how much language could have come from the late 18th and early 19th century?  That fact is irrelevant.  The only possible originator of the text is someone adept in writing cogently in EME.

[Robert F. Smith]

34 minutes ago, Scott Mitchell said:

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

Is it hard to see that, even if you believe in the possible existence of Person(s) X, neither Joseph Smith nor X could have produced the BoM text, because of that one stubborn fact that neither one of them had any familiarity with EME?  In this context, does it make any sense to argue for a study of how much language could have come from the late 18th and early 19th century?  That fact is irrelevant.  The only possible originator of the text is someone adept in writing cogently in EME.

Well stated, Scott, and welcome to this board.

[JarMan]

My newest hypothesis is that the Book of Mormon was translated from the Latin in the 17th Century. Phrases like “plan of mercy” can be accounted for as a literal translation of the Latin phrase (which is known to exist at the time). Outliers like “derangement” are a little harder to explain. But that could also be accounted for as an artifact of the translation. The logical word to have used there is “frenziment” based on the context. But frenziment is not a word so the translator had to come up with something equivalent. Did he have an equivalent English word available? Maybe the word “confusion” would have done it, but perhaps the translator decided instead to borrow a word from a culturally related language that he felt might be understood and that he felt better conveyed the intended meaning. 

[clarkgoble]

22 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Dee's seerstone was made from obsidian by the Aztecs, which is why it could be used as a mirror (it was called "The Devil's Looking Glass: The Magical Speculum of Dr. John Dee"), and Mesoamerican priests and shamans regularly used such stones, right up to the present day, to predict the future and to heal.  They are called zaztun in Maya language -- see the photo and description in National Geographic, 148/6 (Dec 1975), 746-747.

That's interesting. I knew about Dee using it but not the Aztec use.

[Rajah Manchou]

8 hours ago, hope_for_things said:

There is Swedenborg's writings from the 1700s, many believe were influential on Joseph's conception of the three degrees of glory.  Do any of his writings have elements of grammar and syntax from 15c and 16c works.  

7 hours ago, Ryan Dahle said:

As for Joseph's possible familiarity with Swedenborg, I think that first you would need to establish, beyond superficial parallels between their works, that there is some likelihood that Joseph read from Swedenborg. Did he own any of his works or mention anything about them directly? Yet even if we could make that link (I've never checked on it personally), then you would have to see how many of Swedenborg's writings contain anything like the EModE syntax. It's an interesting proposal, but I highly doubt there is much there, considering that Swedenborg's texts were surely in the databases that Skousen and Carmack sifted through. If there is something there, they probably already know about it and can tell you.

This was mentioned in another thread, but I didn't have the link at the time. SWEDENBORG and the BOOK OF MORMON

Here's one example among many:

Swedenborg quoted hundreds of verses from both the Old and New Testaments. The first indication that the Book of Mormon author is copying Biblical verses from Swedenborg's work is in 3 Nephi 11:27, it reads: 

"...and I am in the Father and the Father in me, and the Father and I are one." 

Swedenborg's rendition of this verse is nearly the same as in the Book of Mormon: 

"The Lord is in the Father, and the Father in him, and that He and the Father are one." (Four Doctrines p. 2) 

But the New Testament reads differently from both Swedenborg and the Book of Mormon: 

"I and my Father are one." (John 10:30. Then 8 verses later: "...the Father is in me and I in him" (John 10:38) 

Swedenborg has combined John's verse 30 with verse 38, and the Book of Mormon author seems to have followed Swedenborg, even with the use of the word "and" between the two segments.

[champatsch]

17 hours ago, hope_for_things said:

What happens when a 19c century farm boy with little formal education dictates a script that he's intentionally trying to make sound ancient?

Well, we get a pseudo-biblical type text.  I've compared a number of different types of Book of Mormon syntax with what is found in four pseudo-biblical books.  They're quite different.  The level of true archaism present in the earliest text of the Book of Mormon far exceeds that of the pseudo-biblicals.  But Joseph Smith wasn't as well educated as these authors.  So is it a valid comparison?  Several times I've been told elsewhere, however, that Mormons don't give Joseph the credit he deserves in terms of his literary abilities.  This is of course to explain a variety of things, including the literary quality of the Book of Mormon, in many instances.  So we should at least elevate him to the level of the better educated pseudo-biblical authors.  And once we admit that, we must grant that a pseudo-biblical comparison is actually worthwhile.

Here's something from a working paper that includes some discussion of aspects of high-level archaic language in the Book of Mormon:

1 Nephi 10:13–14

Wherefore [Lehi] said . . . AFTER that the house of Israel should be scattered, they should be gathered together again,

RECAST: And therefore [Lehi] said . . . after the Israelites were scattered, they would be gathered back together,

The archaic time conjunction after that is employed here followed by a sentence containing the indefinite anterior future auxiliary should, since the context is one of indefinite future time, expressed in the past (basically a subjunctive marker). Another instance of should follows, equivalent to present-day would (also future in the past). An after-clause with should functioning as an indefinite anterior future auxiliary does not appear to be found in the King James Bible, yet it is occasionally noted in the earlier textual record, as in the following translation language, by prominent translators of the period:

1602, Thomas Lodge (translator), Flavius Josephus’s Works
         Moreouer he added, that the Aegyptians should feele the plague, AFTER that the people of the Hebrewes should (in despight of their resistance) depart out of their countrey:

RECAST: Moreover, he added that the Egyptians would feel the plague after the Israelites departed from their country (despite their resistance):

1608, Edward Grimeston (translator), Jean François Le Petit’s A general history of the Netherlands
        That AFTER that the King of Spaines agreation should bee sent out of Spaine, all the shippes of warre should bee commanded to depart from the Coast of Spaine,

RECAST: That after the king of Spain’s agreement was sent out of Spain, all the ships of war would be commanded to depart from the coast of Spain,

By considering a large number of such examples, the language of the Book of Mormon (including 1 Nephi 10:13–14) can be shown to be well-formed, archaic usage. LDS commentators do occasionally note that the Book of Mormon contains such language.

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Most analysts seem to overlook or downplay well-formed, complex aspects of grammatical usage in the Book of Mormon (but see Roger Terry 2014b:61: “the sentence structure of the book is very complex, with long, convoluted sentences sometimes employing multiple layers of parenthetical statements and relative clauses”). We actually encounter complex grammar quite frequently in the text, as shown earlier in this study and by the following case involving multiple embedding (found in Skousen 1994b:32–33; from research by Carol Hicks; mentioned by Terry after the above quote):

3 Nephi 5:14

And it hath become expedient
    that I, according to the will of God
         — that the prayers
              of those which have gone hence,
              which were the holy ones,
        should be fulfilled according to their faith —
    should make a record of these things which have been done,

     Any explanatorily adequate view has to encompass both archaic, literary language and apparent bad grammar. One that is adequate and accurate is an archaic English view, as passages such as the following make clear:

3 Nephi 7:12

therefore Jacob seeing that their enemies were more numerous than they
he being the king of the band
therefore he commanded his people
       (1) that they should take their flight into the northernmost part of the land
       (2) and ▲ there build up unto themselves a kingdom
            (a) until they were joined by dissenters
                 —for he flattered them that there would be many dissenters—
            (b) and they ▲ become sufficiently strong
            to contend with the tribes of the people

At the beginning of the passage we have a complex nominative absolute construction, then dual-object command syntax with two embedded clauses involving typical ellipsis (“and [(that) they should] there build up”), followed by a dependent time-conjunction structure with gapping (medial ellipsis) of archaic were in a conjoined predicate (“they [were] become”). This analysis and alternatives are mentioned in the second edition of ATV. Here is a possible match with the final portion of this syntax:

1658, Peter Heylin, The stumbling-block of disobedience and rebellion

The Ephori were not instituted in the State of Sparta
till the Kings were brought under the command of the Senate,
and the State ▲ become an Aristocracy,

Heylin was a prolific writer and the author of the detailed encyclopedia Cosmography.

What is ellipted in this 1658 example is was before become, recoverable from the preceding were. (A subjunctive reading is not warranted from the context, which is possible in 3 Nephi 7:12, but to my mind unlikely.)

[champatsch]

On 11/10/2017 at 12:22 PM, churchistrue said:

But if there is extensive and overwhelming evidence of 19c authorship, that could get to a point where it overrides the low probability of a 19c author properly using the 16c grammar such that 19c authorship becomes the more plausible theory. Do you see a possibility of these 19c aspects reaching that level?

19c implausibility: using the 16c grammar and vocabularly correctly

16c implausibility: lots of 19c stuff in it

Could the 19c stuff ever get to be so overwhelming, we accept the 16c grammar implausibility?

When you write 16c, you mean 16c and 17c.  And when you write 19c, you mean 18c and early 19c.  Also, I will assume that if the Lord carried out a 16c translation, then that translation was reworked at least once.  (We could of course stipulate to an initial 17c translation, because of the reliance on the King James text. We could also speculate translation into other languages, and that it was secondarily translated from one of those.) We cannot assume a 16c translation and that that was the end of it.  If there was an early translation, then there needed to be a (final) reworking no earlier than about 1750.  We still need a careful cataloguing of King James Bible passages, determining how many are certainly 1769 readings, differing from the 1611, and when those readings first were adopted.  I have also found three 1611 readings that must be considered along with this.  These need to be checked for when they were changed.  If we decide that the evidence points to the need of a 1769 King James Bible, then the (final) reworking could have been no earlier than that time.  The Book of Mormon text relies on the King James text and not the underlying languages in some cases.

To your point, you will find some phrases that do not go back before the 18c, but in most cases you will find that they go back into the 17c, as "demands of justice" does.  I say this because I have searched for a lot of them in the past and found them.  And shouldn't we pay attention to the first uses?  They are certainly interesting from a theological and philological point of view.  What antecedents led to them?  Does some Book of Mormon grammar fit with their usage?  I have shown some examples of that in the above case.  In any event, you need to find which ones are certainly modern only, like "plan of salvation" (1720s).  Search ECCO and EEBO as well as Google Books.  The latter is sometimes helpful, and I use it a lot as well.  I think I found a pretty early example of "sing the song of redeeming love" using Google Books (1721).  Before that, there are hymnals from the 1690s that have "redeeming love" and "sing" used very close together.

But the syntactic stuff is stronger evidence than the simple phrases.  The latter are mostly produced consciously, since they're content-rich, while the grammar is very often content-independent and it is mostly produced subsconsciously, and is therefore a better diagnostic of authorship.  Less chance for manipulation.  And in a lengthy text of 270,000 words we can discover the systematic use.  A multitude of items and a study of systematic tendencies indicate a surprisingly thoroughgoing Early Modern English competence (implicit knowledge) in the form and structure of the Book of Mormon's English language.

Edited November 11, 2017 by champatsch