Where did the Book of Mormon come from?

[Brant Gardner]

1 hour ago, champatsch said:

You wish to call this a modern text because of a few modern features.  Very well.

Very well. Regardless of your expertise in showing that there is an astounding level of archaism in the Book of Mormon, you have also demonstrated by evidence you have found that there are more modern elements. That dates the text. We can both agree that it has an astounding level of archaisms--but it cannot date to earlier than its latest elements.

1 hour ago, champatsch said:

I have listed on earlier pages of this thread some of the astounding levels of archaism found in the earliest text.

I don't deny this at all. I never have. I readily admit that you have described archaism in the text. Scholarship requires that if we are to propose dating, we date from the newest, not the oldest elements. I am suggesting nothing more than that we should follow basic interpretive procedures when applied to the descriptive data.

 

 

[strappinglad]

I take clues from the best witnesses, Joseph's scribes. They present the process as very smooth flowing and continuous . If I read Sorenson correctly, translating from most Glyphic writing would be a very slow and hesitant procedure as Glyphs are multi-dimensional and metaphoric , hence subject to several interpretations. Joseph may have been shown the original ,but he was likely to have also been shown the English from a previous translation done by someone who was familiar with the Nephite writing and learned the English over centuries of exposure. From pure speculation I suggest one ( or more ) of the " Three ".

[hope_for_things]

37 minutes ago, strappinglad said:

From pure speculation I suggest one ( or more ) of the " Three ".

I’m thinking it was Cain because he definitely would have been bored from all that wandering business and we have witnesses of early Cain sightings.  

[Rajah Manchou]

1 hour ago, strappinglad said:

he was likely to have also been shown the English from a previous translation done by someone who was familiar with the Nephite writing and learned the English over centuries of exposure. From pure speculation I suggest one ( or more ) of the " Three ".

From 1823 to 1829, the angel Moroni appeared at least twenty times to Joseph Smith and others. Those appearances opened the way for the translation and publication of the Book of Mormon and laid the foundation of many of the Church's most characteristic teachings. As a resurrected messenger of God, Moroni told Joseph Smith about the Nephite record on gold plates and taught him concerning the gathering of Israel, the forthcoming visit of Elijah, the imminence of the second coming of Jesus Christ, and the judgments to be poured out on the world prior to that event.

It is reported that during those years Joseph Smith also received visits from Mormon, Nephi, and other "angels of God unfolding the majesty and glory of the events that should transpire in the last days" (HC 4:537; cf. JD 17:374; Petersen, p. 131).

Other sources indicate that Moroni appeared also to Mary Whitmer, W. W. Phelps, Heber C. Kimball, John Taylor, and Oliver Granger (Peterson, pp. 151-52).
(source)

Edited March 14, 2018 by Rajah Manchou

[strappinglad]

29 minutes ago, Rajah Manchou said:

the imminence of the second coming of Jesus

If only I could get away with the Lord's definition of immanent = soon when my spouse asks when I am going to empty the garbage .

[Rajah Manchou]

25 minutes ago, strappinglad said:

If only I could get away with the Lord's definition of immanent = soon when my spouse asks when I am going to empty the garbage .

And the forthcoming mowing of the lawn

[Gray]

22 hours ago, Glenn101 said:

Sounds sort of like some early critics of the Book of Mormon who did not feel they had to read it in order to criticize it. 

Probably. But you need to actually tune into what Stanford has been saying. It would help to at least know what his arguments are.

 

Yes, that would help. Stanford says that he has actually tried to get someone to (another linguist, non-LDS I presume) to review his findings, but the person declined. It has been noted some time ago by a couple of evangelicals that the LDS are far ahead of the critics in scholarship in areas related to the Book of Mormon.

 

Glenn 

I'll be interested to see how it develops.

[Gray]

On 3/12/2018 at 1:01 PM, champatsch said:

The early revelations Gardner refers to in this comment were received by Joseph Smith before and during the dictation of the 1829 Book of Mormon text.  He received them in the same way as the Book of Mormon text.  Thus they cannot be used as evidence of the archaisms Joseph was capable of producing from his own biblically influenced language. 

This strikes me as a species of special pleading.

[JarMan]

On 3/12/2018 at 12:01 PM, champatsch said:

The early revelations Gardner refers to in this comment were received by Joseph Smith before and during the dictation of the 1829 Book of Mormon text.  He received them in the same way as the Book of Mormon text.  Thus they cannot be used as evidence of the archaisms Joseph was capable of producing from his own biblically influenced language.  This is like using a selection from the Book of Mormon in order to show what Joseph's archaizing language was.  (That one is presumably a translation and the other not is irrelevant to either of our positions about Joseph wording the text or not.)

I don't think we can ignore the 1828 Book of Mormon text. We don't have it, of course, but I think we have to consider the possibility that archaisms appearing in Joseph's language after the 1828 translation process began can be attributed to things picked up while dictating the lost pages. If we ignore this possibility I think we are making unwarranted assumptions.

[champatsch]

On 3/13/2018 at 7:09 PM, Brant Gardner said:

Very well. Regardless of your expertise in showing that there is an astounding level of archaism in the Book of Mormon, you have also demonstrated by evidence you have found that there are more modern elements. That dates the text. We can both agree that it has an astounding level of archaisms--but it cannot date to earlier than its latest elements.

I don't deny this at all. I never have. I readily admit that you have described archaism in the text. Scholarship requires that if we are to propose dating, we date from the newest, not the oldest elements. I am suggesting nothing more than that we should follow basic interpretive procedures when applied to the descriptive data.

I've been suffering through multiple, relatively lengthy power outages in my neck of the woods...

So the dating of the text must be to the latest elements...  Not exactly, because we first encounter plural–singular "we are a descendant of X" in the 1880s.  Or, if we wish to date it according to attested vocabulary rather than syntax, we currently have that unwearyingness first appeared in print (outside of the Book of Mormon) in 1869.  (Maybe there's some later vocabulary; I can't recall at the moment.)  So therefore the text must be dated to sometime before the latest elements, to avoid being nonsensical.  Playing along, let's say we declare that September 1827 is the date of the Book of Mormon text.  Well, then, you get that Joseph worded the text because it's a modern text of the year 1827 (which I suppose is what you're after with this emphasis on dating).  We get that the (final) preparation of the English-language text occurred in September 1827—and at that time the words were ready for delivery to Joseph (to use language from 2 Nephi 27).

Putting one date on the whole text is, after all, unproductive to answering the question of whether Joseph worded the text.

Edited March 15, 2018 by champatsch

[Brant Gardner]

1 hour ago, champatsch said:

So the dating of the text must be to the latest elements...  Not exactly, because we first encounter plural–singular "we are a descendant of X" in the 1880s.  Or, if we wish to date it according to attested vocabulary rather than syntax, we currently have that unwearyingness first appeared in print (outside of the Book of Mormon) in 1869. 

It is seldom that I see a better explanation for why a particular methodology doesn't work. It is obvious that the Book of Mormon was translated before it was translated--ergo the later vocabulary or syntax is the result of the reporting of comparative data. There is no reason for special pleading to avoid the same explanation for elements earlier than Joseph. If the methodology cannot create consistent and accurate results, then the methodology is flawed.

What you are telling us is that in all of your articles, you have not been examining the entire range of data, but only presenting those elements that fit your thesis. 

[Robert F. Smith]

On 3/13/2018 at 9:31 AM, hope_for_things said:

...........................   The first essay is written by Richard Bushman, and I’d like to share a select portion as I think his writing is relevant to this thread. 

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

Bushman, Richard L., “The Gold Plates as Foundational Text,” in Mark Ashurst-McGee, Robin Jensen, Sharalyn D. Howcroft, eds., Foundational Texts of Mormonism (OUP, 2018), 13-36, can be read online at https://books.google.com/books?id=hY5HDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false , as can the following chapter by Grant Hardy (a quite important chapter on textual analysis of the BofM).

[champatsch]

21 hours ago, Gray said:

This strikes me as a species of special pleading.

If you entertain only one, favored perspective, then perhaps it's special pleading.  But if you consider more than one perspective, then you will see that it is not special pleading, or at the very least, that early Doctrine and Covenants revelations cannot decide the question of whether Joseph Smith worded the text of the Book of Mormon.

Suppose you think that Joseph worded the Book of Mormon text, either from his own ideas or received ideas. Then you can take these early Doctrine and Covenants as evidence of his language as long as you rule out that he might have received words in the case of these revelations.

Suppose you think that Joseph did not word the Book of Mormon text, that words were delivered to him (as stated more than once in 2 Nephi 27).  Then it is no leap, but merely a consistency, to think that he did not word the early Doctrine and Covenants, since they were received contemporaneously with and in the same manner as the Book of Mormon.

Going further, suppose early Doctrine and Covenants revelations are evidence of Joseph's language.  The data set is too small to show that the archaism of these revelations explains the archaism of the Book of Mormon.  There is simply a huge amount of archaism that is not represented because there are too few words in the revelations.

When I speak of archaism, I do not mean mainly bad grammar.  "Bad grammar" is a part of it, but not the dominating part.  For example, the heavy personal which of the Book of Mormon should not be considered bad grammar since there are many biblical examples of it, even though which is used less than 15 percent of the time as a personal relative pronoun in the King James Bible (it is used more than half the time in the Book of Mormon). (The King James Bible uses personal that the vast majority of the time.)  The non-emphatic affirmative did of the dictation was never edited out, so though archaic it does not rise to the level of the bad grammar.  The same thing for verbal complementation after verbs like cause, command, desire, etc.  Archaic but not bad grammar. Furthermore, a lot of the "bad grammar" wasn't Joseph's bad grammar.  One example of many is 3sg witness in 2 Nephi 31:18 and 3 Nephi 16:6.  This is clearly explained in Grammatical Variation (2016) under the heading "Endings in -es", with three verbal examples from Early Modern English (which I found) and five nominal examples taken from the Oxford English Dictionary, which are there for all to see.  This is simply another example of extra-biblical archaism in the Book of Mormon, which most people know nothing about.

Edited March 15, 2018 by champatsch

[champatsch]

16 hours ago, Brant Gardner said:

It is seldom that I see a better explanation for why a particular methodology doesn't work. It is obvious that the Book of Mormon was translated before it was translated--ergo the later vocabulary or syntax is the result of the reporting of comparative data. There is no reason for special pleading to avoid the same explanation for elements earlier than Joseph. If the methodology cannot create consistent and accurate results, then the methodology is flawed.

What you are telling us is that in all of your articles, you have not been examining the entire range of data, but only presenting those elements that fit your thesis. 

Please be clearer.  The part in bold is hard to understand.  I think you must understand that according to our position a translation effected by the Lord could be creative and produce usage that is attested elsewhere later in time.  So maybe you mean something other that what I am currently understanding.

My little exercise just attempted to show you that from our perspective your insistence on dating to the latest information doesn't damage our position.  Your preferred methodology may support your position, but the methodology doesn't damage ours.

It strikes me that you have trouble seeing beyond your position and considering our position as well.  If you consider the perspective of both positions, then you will realize that the particular methodology employed under each may work for that view.  From our position, our methodology is well formed; from your position, your methodology is well formed.  Your position is that Joseph Smith had the implicit knowledge to produce a large amount of extra-biblical archaism; our position is that he did not.  Those who are interested enough in the issue can consider relevant articles that describe the archaism, the large amount of textual data presented in Grammatical Variation and in the upcoming The Nature of the Original Language, and decide for themselves.  (To be clear, and as just mentioned, the archaism is not simply bad grammar, which is a small part of it.)

The special pleading is more likely to be yours.  If you impose an archaeological methodology on interpreting the Book of Mormon text that leads to your desired outcome, then I could make the case that you have engaged in special pleading.  I'm not interested in a very small amount of linguistic analysis and a heavy reliance on principles of stratigraphy to reach a linguistic conclusion about the unique Book of Mormon text.  I'm interested in describing and comparing a large amount of hard linguistic data, which is much less susceptible to varied subjective interpretation.

Your presumption is apparent when you write of my not examining the entire range of data.  My published articles have touched on a limited number of syntactic topics, but have tried to treat those fairly and thoroughly.  I haven't gotten to many, many topics in terms of publication, and I have hardly addressed vocabulary, once presenting a quick list of potential archaisms that could have been obsolete by Joseph's time.  Similarly, I haven't published on pronominal usage or other important topics in the Book of Mormon and the textual record, confining myself to a quick list in one of my articles which was on a different topic.  (And Skousen has brought up the noticeable "we are a descendant of X" in a March 2015 lecture, and mentions it on page 12 of Grammatical Variation (2016), noting that it will be covered in part 3 of volume 3.)  You examine very little linguistic data, and when you do, you provide unreliable analysis; we research virtually all interesting linguistic usage in the Book of Mormon that we are aware of.  A full treatment of vocabulary, phrases, expressions, and even some archaic syntax will very shortly appear, as you know, so you write deceptively.  And the deception is more obvious when we consider that Grammatical Variation has been published for two years now, and that there are many, many relevant items covered in those 1,200+ pages.

It falls to you to find dozens of modern examples of likely obsolete vocabulary usage found in the Book of Mormon to support your position, and it falls to you to find persistence of many archaic syntactic structures, usage patterns, and grammar.  I don't see that you have begun to attempt it, or take the text seriously in this regard.  But I don't think you're interested in confronting a lot of data.  I think you're interested in looking at a small amount of data and theorizing—an ideological approach.

Edited March 15, 2018 by champatsch

[Gray]

3 hours ago, champatsch said:

If you entertain only one, favored perspective, then perhaps it's special pleading.  But if you consider more than one perspective, then you will see that it is not special pleading, or at the very least, that early Doctrine and Covenants revelations cannot decide the question of whether Joseph Smith worded the text of the Book of Mormon.

Suppose you think that Joseph worded the Book of Mormon text, either from his own ideas or received ideas. Then you can take these early Doctrine and Covenants as evidence of his language as long as you rule out that he might have received words in the case of these revelations.

Suppose you think that Joseph did not word the Book of Mormon text, that words were delivered to him (as stated more than once in 2 Nephi 27).  Then it is no leap, but merely a consistency, to think that he did not word the early Doctrine and Covenants, since they were received contemporaneously with and in the same manner as the Book of Mormon.

Going further, suppose early Doctrine and Covenants revelations are evidence of Joseph's language.  The data set is too small to show that the archaism of these revelations explains the archaism of the Book of Mormon.  There is simply a huge amount of archaism that is not represented because there are too few words in the revelation.

When I speak of archaism, I do not mean mainly bad grammar.  "Bad grammar" is a part of it, but not the dominating part.  For example, the heavy personal which of the Book of Mormon should not be considered bad grammar since there are many biblical examples of it, even though which is used less than 15 percent of the time as a personal relative pronoun in the King James Bible (it is used more than half the time in the Book of Mormon). (The King James Bible uses personal that the vast majority of the time.)  The non-emphatic affirmative did of the dictation was never edited out, so though archaic it does not rise to the level of the bad grammar.  The same thing for verbal complementation after verbs like cause, command, desire, etc.  Archaic but not bad grammar. Furthermore, a lot of the "bad grammar" wasn't Joseph's bad grammar.  One example of many is 3sg witness in 2 Nephi 31:18 and 3 Nephi 16:6.  This is clearly explained in Grammatical Variation (2016) under the heading "Endings in -es", with three verbal examples from Early Modern English (which I found) and five nominal examples taken from the Oxford English Dictionary, which are there for all to see.  This is simply another example of extra-biblical archaism in the Book of Mormon, which most people know nothing about.

If you're factoring inspiration from God into whether or not you're going to try to account for this data, this becomes a theological exercise rather than a purely scholarly (in the critical sense of the word) one. It seems then that your methods conclusions are partially driven by theological presuppositions, and not strictly textual evidence. In that case I'm not sure it's going to have much value outside of your own theological community. Theology is so open ended that there are practically no bounds to the potential ways to interpret the text through that lens.

I know the theological isn't the ONLY argument you're making, but the fact that it's a factor perhaps tells us why this might not be of much interest to scholars with no stakes in the theological outcome.

Edited March 15, 2018 by Gray

[Brant Gardner]

12 minutes ago, champatsch said:

Please be clearer.  The part in bold is hard to understand.  I think you must understand that according to our position a translation effected by the Lord could be creative and produce usage that is attested elsewhere later in time.  So maybe you mean something other that what I am currently understanding.

That was unclear because I didn't carefully reread it before posting. There is a missing not. The Book of Mormon wasn't translated before it was translated.

Quote

It falls to you to find dozens of modern examples of likely obsolete vocabulary usage found in the Book of Mormon to support your position, and it falls to you to find persistence of many archaic syntactic structures, usage patterns, and grammar.  I don't see that you have begun to attempt it, or take the text seriously in this regard.  But I don't think you're interested in confronting a lot of data.  I think you're interested in looking at a small amount of data and theorizing.  If you don't begin to dig into the issue substantively, in a major way, then I will be forced to view your position as ideological.

Fortunately for me, I don't need to. You have found sufficient information to let us know that the underlying methodology used to date elements of the text is based on both an unprovable absence and, from the few that have been found for future forms, a clear issue with the comparative data. 

At one point, I was pretty sure that we would find some of these archaisms in Joseph's early revelations but that later revelations would not show them. That would be consistent with Joseph learning a more statistically acceptable grammar. However, you helped with that and found exactly what I had expected. We have archaisms in Joseph's language and in a context where it had nothing to do with the Book of Mormon. That should have firmly told us that the similarities had Joseph in common. That wasn't your conclusion. Your explanation was that they had the same pre-writer in common. That seems to me to be an ideological position. 

I have never seen you defend the methodology you are using to suggest that Joseph couldn't have produced that language in the text. Here are the problems with that method:

1) It absolutely depends upon an absence of data, but cannot control whether the absence is meaningful or accidental.

2) It depends upon written texts, which are produced in different circumstances, different education levels, and different geographies from Joseph's local dialect. It also skips the possibility of editorial changes that might have obscured an original author's ungrammaticality (bless editors).

3) It does not produce consistent results. While there are archaisms in the text, there are clearly elements that post-date the archaisms and even include elements that, according to the methodology, were still in the future at the time of the text's dictation. In other words, the method contradicts its own conclusions.

4) The conclusion for the nature of the English language is that it is absolutely idiosyncratic and the dialect of the text was never spoken by any individual at any time.

It falls to the one using a methodology to be able to justify it. 

[clarkgoble]

5 hours ago, champatsch said:

Your position is that Joseph Smith had the implicit knowledge to produce a large amount of extra-biblical archaism; our position is that he did not.

 

3 hours ago, Brant Gardner said:

At one point, I was pretty sure that we would find some of these archaisms in Joseph's early revelations but that later revelations would not show them. That would be consistent with Joseph learning a more statistically acceptable grammar. However, you helped with that and found exactly what I had expected. We have archaisms in Joseph's language and in a context where it had nothing to do with the Book of Mormon. That should have firmly told us that the similarities had Joseph in common. That wasn't your conclusion. Your explanation was that they had the same pre-writer in common. That seems to me to be an ideological position.

It seems that for both of you we're merely expressing suppositions but there's not an empirical way to distinguish them which renders the disagreement as having far less content than it appears at first.

If we don't know how the translation was done beyond that in surface level content it was very loose, I'm not sure how we can say if there was a proto-translation or not. It seems a position impossible to answer. Likewise if Joseph's archaic language only pops up in revelatory states of some sort that's significant too. Again it could be answered in multiple ways, but I'm not sure how on earth one could empirically pick between them.

Put an other way, it seems like we have theological presuppositions of how the text Joseph presented was formed. But it's not at all clear if we could possibly distinguish between them. At best we might find data showing pockets of archaic use in Joseph's environment but I'm very, very skeptical there's anything like data that could show that.

So beyond presuppositions is there anything contentwise where we can establish an empirical difference?

Edited March 15, 2018 by clarkgoble

[Robert F. Smith]

3 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

It seems that for both of you we're merely expressing suppositions but there's not an empirical way to distinguish them which renders the disagreement as having far less content than it appears at first.

If we don't know how the translation was done beyond that in surface level content it was very loose, I'm not sure how we can say if there was a proto-translation or not. It seems a position impossible to answer. Likewise if Joseph's archaic language only pops up in revelatory states of some sort that's significant too. Again it could be answered in multiple ways, but I'm not sure how on earth one could empirically pick between them.

Put an other way, it seems like we have theological presuppositions of how the text Joseph presented was formed. But it's not at all clear if we could possibly distinguish between them. At best we might find data showing pockets of archaic use in Joseph's environment but I'm very, very skeptical there's anything like data that could show that.

So beyond presuppositions is there anything contentwise where we can establish an empirical difference?

If we had only systematic EModE grammar and vocab in the BofM, there would be no choice but to conclude that there was a pre-translation.  But we also have later expressions mixed in, which muddies the waters too much to conclude anything at all.  Moreover, we have archaic language in revelations during that very early BofM period, which further muddies the waters.  What to conclude?

1. God himself rendered these items (both BofM and revelations) in a mixture of EModE and modern English (2 Ne 27:20-21 "I am able to do mine own work").

2. A EModE pre-translator did work which God, Moroni, or Joseph edited while in the midst of smooth dictation (via a mind feedback loop).

3. It was deliberately mixed by God in order to teach the learned a well-deserved lesson (2 Ne 27:26).

What do you propose?  MIDRASH ON ISAIAH 29.pdf

[hope_for_things]

6 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

If we had only systematic EModE grammar and vocab in the BofM, there would be no choice but to conclude that there was a pre-translation.  But we also have later expressions mixed in, which muddies the waters too much to conclude anything at all.  Moreover, we have archaic language in revelations during that very early BofM period, which further muddies the waters.  What to conclude?

1. God himself rendered these items (both BofM and revelations) in a mixture of EModE and modern English (2 Ne 27:20-21 "I am able to do mine own work").

2. A EModE pre-translator did work which God, Moroni, or Joseph edited while in the midst of smooth dictation (via a mind feedback loop).

3. It was deliberately mixed by God in order to teach the learned a well-deserved lesson (2 Ne 27:26).

What do you propose?  MIDRASH ON ISAIAH 29.pdf

Joseph was the author, that's the simple answer.  The EmodE occurs because there were remnants of this speech in his local environment and Joseph picked these up, where else do people acquire language artifacts but through hearing them, and those expressions showed up when he was speaking in his early revelatory voice.  

Of course this evolved with time as everything else, like theology, evolved as well.  The naturalistic explanation for all of the evidence is so much simpler than trying to imagine something supernatural happening.  I see people wrapping themselves around trees trying to come up with some wild theories and it really gets crazy.  I guess there is some appeal in imagination.  

 

[JarMan]

If the goal is to convince people outside the church or people inside the church who've concluded the Book of Mormon is not a 5th Century record of America--if the goal is to convince these people that the Book of Mormon didn't come from Joseph's own mind, then addressing the archaisms in Joseph's early revelations by assuming a supernatural source is dead on arrival. It seems there are a few ways to address this apparent problem, and both start with acknowledging that Joseph's dialect at the time he dictated the early revelations contained some EModE. One approach would be to make the argument that the small amount of EModE in Joseph's dialect couldn't possibly account for the vast amount found in the Book of Mormon. Another way is to show that the the small amount of EModE in Joseph's dialect could have been picked up in the process of producing the lost 116 pages. Otherwise, those who already accept a supernatural source for the Book of Mormon are the only ones who will be convinced.

[Robert F. Smith]

44 minutes ago, hope_for_things said:

Joseph was the author, that's the simple answer.  The EmodE occurs because there were remnants of this speech in his local environment and Joseph picked these up, where else do people acquire language artifacts but through hearing them, and those expressions showed up when he was speaking in his early revelatory voice.  

Of course this evolved with time as everything else, like theology, evolved as well.  The naturalistic explanation for all of the evidence is so much simpler than trying to imagine something supernatural happening.  I see people wrapping themselves around trees trying to come up with some wild theories and it really gets crazy.  I guess there is some appeal in imagination.  

It would be nice if we had some archaic language being spoken in or around that part of upstate New York or Vermont at that time, but there is just no evidence of that EModE dialect present in those areas, so it could not have been available to Joseph.  Moreover, we are not talking simply about a couple of archaic expressions, but rather of an entire grammar and vocabulary from the 16th century, which was extinct and had been for centuries already.  Joseph couldn't use it because it didn't exist in his neighborhood.  In addition the EModE style was the grammatical literate style of the 16th century, not some lowbrow form of expression.  Books by learned men were published in that style.  Dr Carmack has shown this with many articles and lectures in recent years, and has answered any questions or objections right here on this board.  The discussion which he and Brant Gardner have been having here is very helpful, but does not finally solve the ultimate question.

If you want to come up with a theory, at least base it on the evidence as Brant and champatsch do.

[Robert F. Smith]

25 minutes ago, JarMan said:

If the goal is to convince people outside the church or people inside the church who've concluded the Book of Mormon is not a 5th Century record of America

There is no such "goal" that I am aware of, JarMan.  In fact, this unexpected quandary is the last thing that anyone suspected or even considered.  The data came forth from basic research begun by me over 40 years ago in 1974, and continued brilliantly by Royal Skousen in 1988.  My objective was to create a critical text of the Book of Mormon (Skousen's Yale edition is the best result of that long-term effort).  No one sought to find EModE grammar and vocab during that effort.  That just happened to become apparent as the research went forward.  Moreover, there is as yet no rational explanation for the phenomenon.

25 minutes ago, JarMan said:

--if the goal is to convince these people that the Book of Mormon didn't come from Joseph's own mind, then addressing the archaisms in Joseph's early revelations by assuming a supernatural source is dead on arrival.

I'd be more than happy to accept a rational theory of some sort.  Please come forth with one, JarMan.

25 minutes ago, JarMan said:

It seems there are a few ways to address this apparent problem, and both start with acknowledging that Joseph's dialect at the time he dictated the early revelations contained some EModE. One approach would be to make the argument that the small amount of EModE in Joseph's dialect couldn't possibly account for the vast amount found in the Book of Mormon. Another way is to show that the the small amount of EModE in Joseph's dialect could have been picked up in the process of producing the lost 116 pages. Otherwise, those who already accept a supernatural source for the Book of Mormon are the only ones who will be convinced.

I don't believe in supernaturalism anyhow, JarMan, so I don't favor any supernatural theory.  I accept the same secular modes of transmission as we have with the Bible (scribes, editors, transmission, hidden, etc.).  I don't see a need for supernaturalism at all.  Perhaps you think of a seerstone as supernatural, even though you'd never make that claim about your I-Phone or Google Translate.

[Brant Gardner]

14 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

It would be nice if we had some archaic language being spoken in or around that part of upstate New York or Vermont at that time, but there is just no evidence of that EModE dialect present in those areas, so it could not have been available to Joseph. 

It is more complicated than that. Although quotidian language might show up in the Book of Mormon, the language of the Book of Mormon is intentionally different. No one spoke that way. So the problem is that we have a text that is intentionally approximating biblical language--but clearly wasn't written by anyone from the same time as the KJV because they get it wrong. 

What the current evidence suggests if that the same language-generator was likely to have been behind the Book of Mormon and the early revelations. They are the same time period, and both attempt to have the same language. Unfortunately, that could be Joseph, or could be the posited not-Joseph. Quotidian language isn't the comparator here. There is a style that is being imitated by someone not expert in the style--but similar enough that readers would understand that it is "sacred" style language.

That isn't an unusual phenomenon. There were lots of other texts that did the same thing, and they contain some of the same errors. As I remember champatsch's argument, it was that there was a statistical difference. That does suggest a difference, but certainly not a strong indicator that such forms could not have been used contemporaneously. So we don't have a situation where something couldn't have happened, only statistical differences saying that the Book of Mormon had a higher percentage of archaic forms. 

Gregory Bowen's dissertation specifically examined other texts, and all of them attempt to imitate KJV style, none but the professionals get it right--and in many cases, one of the indications that it is imitation rather than fluency is that they overcorrect for "archaic" forms. They use them more than they should have been. In that, the Book of Mormon is similar to other texts that no one has suggested were part of a revealed text.

[Robert F. Smith]

1 hour ago, Brant Gardner said:

It is more complicated than that. Although quotidian language might show up in the Book of Mormon, the language of the Book of Mormon is intentionally different. No one spoke that way. So the problem is that we have a text that is intentionally approximating biblical language--but clearly wasn't written by anyone from the same time as the KJV because they get it wrong.

Yes, but it is precisely the non-KJV phrasing which is diagnostic, because the use of KJV-style is indeed quotidian in 19th century translations of ancient docs, and so cannot be used to indicate the ultimate source if other styles are present in large chunks (as Carmack indicates that EModE style is systematically present).  In each case, it is the unique expressions and grammar from EModE which is diagnostic, and which presents us with an insoluble problem:  How can both old and new styles be combined in one book?

1 hour ago, Brant Gardner said:

What the current evidence suggests if that the same language-generator was likely to have been behind the Book of Mormon and the early revelations. They are the same time period, and both attempt to have the same language. Unfortunately, that could be Joseph, or could be the posited not-Joseph. Quotidian language isn't the comparator here.

Exactly: The "quotidian language" can't be "the comparator here."  Yet the early revelations and the BofM both show the same archaic phenomena, so they present us with the possibility that 2 Ne 27:20-21 puts the blame on God himself.  Otherwise we have no explanation at all.

1 hour ago, Brant Gardner said:

There is a style that is being imitated by someone not expert in the style--but similar enough that readers would understand that it is "sacred" style language.

I don't think so.  The KJV-style does give the impression of Holy language, but is simply not diagnostic -- just quotidian.

1 hour ago, Brant Gardner said:

That isn't an unusual phenomenon. There were lots of other texts that did the same thing, and they contain some of the same errors. As I remember champatsch's argument, it was that there was a statistical difference. That does suggest a difference, but certainly not a strong indicator that such forms could not have been used contemporaneously. So we don't have a situation where something couldn't have happened, only statistical differences saying that the Book of Mormon had a higher percentage of archaic forms. 

Gregory Bowen's dissertation specifically examined other texts, and all of them attempt to imitate KJV style, none but the professionals get it right--and in many cases, one of the indications that it is imitation rather than fluency is that they overcorrect for "archaic" forms. They use them more than they should have been. In that, the Book of Mormon is similar to other texts that no one has suggested were part of a revealed text.

The only "archaic" forms worth examining and using are those unique to EModE.  The imitative KJV-style stuff is irrelevant because quotidian.  As Richard Bushman keeps repeating, the BofM text is so self-conscious and post-modern that we might want to examine what it actually says about itself -- MIDRASH ON ISAIAH 29.pdf .

[Brant Gardner]

1 hour ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Yes, but it is precisely the non-KJV phrasing which is diagnostic, because the use of KJV-style is indeed quotidian in 19th century translations of ancient docs, and so cannot be used to indicate the ultimate source if other styles are present in large chunks (as Carmack indicates that EModE style is systematically present).  In each case, it is the unique expressions and grammar from EModE which is diagnostic, and which presents us with an insoluble problem:  How can both old and new styles be combined in one book?

The way language works is that there is a statistical sense of acceptable and grammatical. That changes with time, but never smoothly or completely. At the time the Book of Mormon was dictated, Early Modern English wasn't an archaic form--it was a particular flavor of ungrammatical. Regardless of how well the poor grammar reflected acceptable grammar from a long time previous, it had not been grammatical for a long time. So how do we get Early Modern English, forms that were clearly later than that, forms that were very close to Joseph's time, and finally, some that aren't found in the contemporary dataset--all in the same document? The easiest answer is that we are seeing a particular idiolect--and ungrammatical imitation of KJV language that gets it wrong in ways that had been wrong for a long time.

The result is to suggest that both the Book of Mormon and the early revelations were created in pieces by someone who was not fluent in English, or by multiple individuals who added their own ungrammatical phrases but representing different time periods of ungrammaticality. Although Carmack indicates the Early Modern English occurs with great frequency, it is not exclusive. It coexists with things that don't fit. So either we take the parsimonious answer that the reason that it appears that we have the same English behind the early revelations and the Book of Mormon, or we have to invent a committee. Maybe we might see that for the Book of Mormon, but it is difficult to imagine how that works for the revelations.

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Yet the early revelations and the BofM both show the same archaic phenomena, so they present us with the possibility that 2 Ne 27:20-21 puts the blame on God himself.  Otherwise we have no explanation at all.

Of course there is an explanation. Joseph's language informed the English text, and rather than a complex description of a somehow ancient, contemporary, future text--we are seeing a description of Joseph's version of imitative KJV English. If we don't include Joseph, we have to suggest that the later revelations had a different source. That is always possible, because declaring it unknowable covers a lot of sins--but it seems more parsimonious to suggest the same God, the same inspiration, and the same person creating the English text.

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The only "archaic" forms worth examining and using are those unique to EModE.  The imitative KJV-style stuff is irrelevant because quotidian.  

I apologize, but I don't understand this. The Early Modern English is not diagnostic. It is dependent upon the assumption that it became obsolete. The methodology by which it has been declared diagnostic is flawed and cannot provide accurate information about whether those forms could have been present in Joseph's idiolect. Descriptive is not diagnostic.