Fields Roper Book of Mormon Wordprint Study

[hope_for_things]

On 2/23/2018 at 1:17 PM, churchistrue said:

The BOM prophets Mormon, Moroni, and Nephi transform their own voice across these voices (from N to S and in Mormon’s case even adding L), in a way that has similar variation that LDS researchers have formerly attributed to statistically unique voices.

This is just an odd thought on my part, but do you know if there have been any studies of people with split personalities, and their ability to speak in distinctly different styles and patterns when communicating through their differing personas?  

[cdowis]

3 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

There's a simple way to test this of course - deal with texts based upon ideograms and see what survives translation using wordprint analysis. It's telling that neither apologists nor critics have made this obvious test. Compare two translations of say the Tao Te Ching. Or better yet the Analytics comparing passages that are argued to have different authors.

Hilton did something similar.

we also studied english translations of semiclassical texts written by different german authors these academic translations were all carefully done by the same german to english translator the  wordprint measurements regarding translations provided three significant results 1 each translated author is consistent within himself 2 when several german authors are translated by the same person the english rendition of each author is clearly separable from the others and 3 the translators other english writings have consistent  wordprints that differ from any of his translated works 17 these findings demonstrate that at least when an academic translator tries to produce a close translation from one modem language to another the uniqueness of an original authors wordprint can actually survive the translation process 18

Edited February 27, 2018 by cdowis

[clarkgoble]

47 minutes ago, cdowis said:

Hilton did something similar.

we also studied english translations of semiclassical texts written by different german authors these academic translations were all carefully done by the same german to english translator the  wordprint measurements regarding translations provided three significant results 1 each translated author is consistent within himself 2 when several german authors are translated by the same person the english rendition of each author is clearly separable from the others and 3 the translators other english writings have consistent  wordprints that differ from any of his translated works 17 these findings demonstrate that at least when an academic translator tries to produce a close translation from one modem language to another the uniqueness of an original authors wordprint can actually survive the translation process 18

Again it's not similar unless you're looking at ideograms. The whole point is that the words wordprint are looking for statistical significance over aren't in the underlying text. Therefore they're added by the translator and not the author. German is a language very closely related to English as I'm sure you know. It uses the types of words in question and they actually have fairly similar English words rendering translation easier. So this establishes nothing.

To undermine this argument you basically have to show that a translation of ideograms involves these connective words being unique to the underlying author. This should be easy. The Analytics are a very well studied text with differing authorship relatively well established. If Hilton is right this should show up in the translation. If it doesn't (and I'd be shocked if it does) then the entire project is pointless.

[churchistrue]

11 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

Again it's not similar unless you're looking at ideograms. The whole point is that the words wordprint are looking for statistical significance over aren't in the underlying text. Therefore they're added by the translator and not the author. German is a language very closely related to English as I'm sure you know. It uses the types of words in question and they actually have fairly similar English words rendering translation easier. So this establishes nothing.

To undermine this argument you basically have to show that a translation of ideograms involves these connective words being unique to the underlying author. This should be easy. The Analytics are a very well studied text with differing authorship relatively well established. If Hilton is right this should show up in the translation. If it doesn't (and I'd be shocked if it does) then the entire project is pointless.

I strongly agree with clarkgoble here. The theories and interest I had in BOM wordprint studies I started developing 20 years ago, and I thought they would show whether or not the book is "true" or not, ie multiple unique voices = true, lacking in that = not true. But over time, as I've understood better what would be involved in a translation process and especially if you give any deference to the loose translation theories that explain the KJV correlation and various anachronisms, then I think you understand it's not likely to find any unique, multiple voices even if it is ancient. Even the Skousen-Carmack research is implying some sort of loose translation. So, there is a dictation. But it's not of an academically careful word for word translation. I still think wordprint study will give clues to its creation, especially the two trends I've identified. 

[cdowis]

37 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

To undermine this argument you basically have to show that a translation of ideograms involves these connective words being unique to the underlying author. This should be easy. The Analytics are a very well studied text with differing authorship relatively well established. If Hilton is right this should show up in the translation. If it doesn't (and I'd be shocked if it does) then the entire project is pointless.

 

 " measuring the authors  wordprint by studying the use rate of sixty five noncontextual contextual non word pattern ratios as proposed by morton 1985 ....when we tested these control texts we found that our technique yielded well defined bell shaped distributions showing that our new  wordprint technique is essentially insensitive to the textual changes introduced by the differing literary parameters of genre subject matter writing period position in an authors career or normal publication editing"

He does show a unique use of such words according to a specific author.

[clarkgoble]

27 minutes ago, cdowis said:

" measuring the authors  wordprint by studying the use rate of sixty five noncontextual contextual non word pattern ratios as proposed by morton 1985 ....when we tested these control texts we found that our technique yielded well defined bell shaped distributions showing that our new  wordprint technique is essentially insensitive to the textual changes introduced by the differing literary parameters of genre subject matter writing period position in an authors career or normal publication editing"

He does show a unique use of such words according to a specific author.

I'd encourage you to go reread my two comments. You're missing the argument. It has to be tested with ideograms. I was pretty clear on that I thought. Translations between two closely related languages is irrelevant to the argument. To be clear ideograms are characters that can represent complex ideas, phrases or more. They are put along side one an other and are a very, very different way of writing. Again there's a trivial way to solve the problem - do it on translations of the the Analytics which involves underlying ideograms. But when you keep presenting examples that aren't of translations from ideograms you're kind of missing the plot.

Edited February 27, 2018 by clarkgoble

[cdowis]

59 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

I'd encourage you to go reread my two comments. You're missing the argument. It has to be tested with ideograms. I was pretty clear on that I thought. Translations between two closely related languages is irrelevant to the argument.

Sorry, but you are mistaken that it is necessary, when testingr a methodology that gives statistically consistent results == you are able to identify separate authors vs same author on your test materials under controlled conditions.  Hilton and the Berkeley goup was using the German book translations merely to verify what was already tested with English language books.  It is using a belt and suspenders approach to demonstrate that the methodology works even with translated material.

Edited February 27, 2018 by cdowis

[clarkgoble]

2 hours ago, cdowis said:

Sorry, but you are mistaken that it is necessary, when testingr a methodology that gives statistically consistent results == you are able to identify separate authors vs same author on your test materials under controlled conditions.  Hilton and the Berkeley goup was using the German book translations merely to verify what was already tested with English language books.  It is using a belt and suspenders approach to demonstrate that the methodology works even with translated material.

Right and I’m noting that proves nothing unless you look at all the classes of underlying languages. It’s really simple and basic linguistics. Not much more to say if you can’t understand why. Not all languages function the way German does. Part of basic science is looking at your assumptions and testing that your methods hold when your assumptions don’t. Especially when there are compelling reasons to think they don’t. In this case that hasn’t been done.

Not sure what else to say as it appears you think all languages function the same way. That’s simple not true. I’m even giving the easy case since Chinese are technically logograms rather than pure ideograms. So they have more information than I suspect the Book of Mormon text does.

Now of course maybe I’m wrong and there’s a way to do it. But without first demonstrating that (which German can’t do) their method seems beside the point except as I said perhaps to argue against 19th century authors. (Or 17th if anyone wants to do Grotius)

Edited February 28, 2018 by clarkgoble

[Calm]

A review of the presentation:

https://searchisaiah.org/headlines/is-stylometry-the-ultimate-proof-that-joseph-smith-did-not-write-the-book-of-mormon/

[mfbukowski]

On 2/23/2018 at 3:25 PM, cdowis said:

The wordprint studies that I have seen fail the validation test, if any test was made at all. 

When I see "stylometrics" it puts a shiver up my spine.

Yeah, I like their music too.

 

[Robert F. Smith]

On 2/27/2018 at 1:13 PM, clarkgoble said:

Again it's not similar unless you're looking at ideograms. The whole point is that the words wordprint are looking for statistical significance over aren't in the underlying text. Therefore they're added by the translator and not the author. German is a language very closely related to English as I'm sure you know. It uses the types of words in question and they actually have fairly similar English words rendering translation easier. So this establishes nothing.

To undermine this argument you basically have to show that a translation of ideograms involves these connective words being unique to the underlying author. This should be easy. The Analytics are a very well studied text with differing authorship relatively well established. If Hilton is right this should show up in the translation. If it doesn't (and I'd be shocked if it does) then the entire project is pointless.

It doesn't matter whether the Book of Mormon (or some other text) was originally composed using logograms, ideograms, or syllabic cuneiform.  The source-language is of no importance.  The translator himself will inevitably create a style of translation which reflects both the variety of characters in the source text, so that they can be differentiated from one another, and also the voice of the author.  Why?  Because stylometric analysis depends not on unique and substantive vocabulary, but on the unconscious use of non-contextual words (ordinary function words which no one otherwise notices).

Non-Mormon scholars regularly use such tools:  http://www.philocomp.net/humanities/signature.htm ., and http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/stylometry.html , for example.

[clarkgoble]

14 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

It doesn't matter whether the Book of Mormon (or some other text) was originally composed using logograms, ideograms, or syllabic cuneiform.  The source-language is of no importance.  The translator himself will inevitably create a style of translation which reflects both the variety of characters in the source text, so that they can be differentiated from one another, and also the voice of the author.  Why?  Because stylometric analysis depends not on unique and substantive vocabulary, but on the unconscious use of non-contextual words (ordinary function words which no one otherwise notices).

Non-Mormon scholars regularly use such tools:  http://www.philocomp.net/humanities/signature.htm ., and http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/stylometry.html , for example.

Yes but the type they were looking for here, if the underlying text were ideograms, would have come from Joseph (or depending upon how one views his use of the U&T the process doing the translation). That is the question is ultimately tied to what you point out: "the unconscious use of non-contextual words." The question is whose unconscious is at work. 

Now if you know of an example of a translation from ideograms that has stylometric markers identifying authors that isn't due to the translator I'm all ears. I'll admit I can't see how it'd work.

Edited April 29, 2018 by clarkgoble

[Robert F. Smith]

2 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

Yes but the type they were looking for here, if the underlying text were ideograms, would have come from Joseph (or depending upon how one views his use of the U&T the process doing the translation). That is the question is ultimately tied to what you point out: "the unconscious use of non-contextual words." The question is whose unconscious is at work. 

Yes, of course.  And, since we know that the language of the BofM translation was not Joseph's, we have to look for some other source.  Joseph merely read the words off of his stone so that his scribes could write it down.  Stylometric analysis might even tell us who that person is, much as a fingerprint identifies someone.

2 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

Now if you know of an example of a translation from ideograms that has stylometric markers identifying authors that isn't due to the translator I'm all ears. I'll admit I can't see how it'd work.

The reason that ideograms don't matter (when you don't have them) is because a translation is a translation is a translation.  The translator is merely rendering the source language into his language.  His language, not the source language, and we don't have the source of the BofM.  And each translator will provide a different way of expressing that source language in translation.  Some translators use a lot of idiomatic expressions which are dissimilar to the source expressions, even though they are equivalent.  Other translators provide rather wooden and stodgy conformity to the odd expressions in the text -- such as "I love you will all my liver."  Modern English translators might change that to "I love you with all my heart."  However, heart and liver would not be part of any stylometric analysis, so that such comments are irrelevant.

If we have the source text (such as the letters of Paul), then we can say much more.  However, in the case of original compositions by novelists, or in the case of the BofM, we cannot examine any underlying text.  We are dependent upon only on that text for our analysis.

[clarkgoble]

3 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

The reason that ideograms don't matter (when you don't have them) is because a translation is a translation is a translation.  The translator is merely rendering the source language into his language.  His language, not the source language, and we don't have the source of the BofM.  And each translator will provide a different way of expressing that source language in translation.

Seems like we're agreeing. My point was just that stylometry may reflect the translator and not the source text. In that case author identification seems somewhat dubious and may just reflect unconscious word choice by the translation process. Which is all I was arguing.

[Robert F. Smith]

27 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

Seems like we're agreeing. My point was just that stylometry may reflect the translator and not the source text. In that case author identification seems somewhat dubious and may just reflect unconscious word choice by the translation process. Which is all I was arguing.

The problem with that is that one can differentiate the individual authors in the BofM.  For whatever reason each is distinguishable.  Of course the same is true of the various characters found in novels -- attributed to the ability of the novelist to speak in the different voices that the characters have.  However, the same comes through in the KJV translation.  For whatever reason, each character in the Bible (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Paul) speak in such different voices that they can be differentiated.  And I am not even considering the Hebrew and Greek texts, which can likewise be analyzed for stylometrics.

[clarkgoble]

On 4/29/2018 at 10:28 PM, Robert F. Smith said:

The problem with that is that one can differentiate the individual authors in the BofM.  For whatever reason each is distinguishable.  Of course the same is true of the various characters found in novels -- attributed to the ability of the novelist to speak in the different voices that the characters have.  

That is the key problem of course. Again, how significant one sees stylometry (and I'll admit I'm very skeptical) depends upon how you see authorship. But if stylometry is used to argue for authorship then there's a certain vicious circle in ones arguments.

My argument was just that a common view of the plates as ideograms suggests the stylometry likely didn't come from the writing on the plates. If that's the case, then it's hard to see what the significance is.

Edited May 1, 2018 by clarkgoble

[Robert F. Smith]

17 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

That is the key problem of course. Again, how significant one sees stylometry (and I'll admit I'm very skeptical) depends upon how you see authorship. But if stylometry is used to argue for authorship then there's a certain vicious circle in ones arguments.

Correct.  However, this is not a problem unique to Mormon use of non-Mormon scholarship.  It applies across the board.  In the case of St Paul, we at least have a Greek text to analyze.  The harder question to deal with in the Book of Mormon is the unlikelihood that Joseph could create a complex text in which individual authors can be objectively distinguished from each other.  Moreover, the results coincide with other types of research:  For example, in my careful study of the statistical occurrence of "it came to pass" in the Book of Mormon, I found that the rate varied with author, and with genre, and in just the same fashion that it does in the Bible (even the same rate).  One author, Mormon, turned out to exhibit the exact same rate in his two books -- Words of Mormon and book of Mormon, and nowhere else.  See my “’It Came To Pass’ in the Bible and the Book of Mormon,” FARMS Preliminary Report SMI-80b (Provo: FARMS, 1980/updated 1981, 1983), online at http://publications.mi.byu.edu/publications/PreliminaryReports/Smith, Robert F., "It Came to Pass" in the Bible and the Book of Mormon.pdf .

17 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

My argument was just that a common view of the plates as ideograms suggests the stylometry likely didn't come from the writing on the plates. If that's the case, then it's hard to see what the significance is.

Reading Egyptian logograms or ideograms does not materially differ from reading Egyptian alphabetic or syllabic signs.  The translation will be the same for me in any case.  If you look at reading of Maya glyphs, you will note the same fact for translations in those cases.  Take a look at the Popol Vuh, for example, and you will see that the latin transliteration of the Mayan words is the same as if it had been taken directly from a hieroglyphic text.  It is a bit more complicated when reading syllabic and logographic cuneiform, since both Sumerian and Akkadian may simultaneously be involved, but the translation will not materially differ in any case.

[clarkgoble]

I definitely think stylometry is helpful for literary criticism and analysis. That's not the issue I have.