Skousen & Carmack Lecture Take Aways

[Benjamin Seeker]

50 minutes ago, Exiled said:

This doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever.  Why would God have someone else translate or compose some text and then force the text through the rock and hat?  Why not be more direct here?  Just have the original translator/composer step forward, without the theatrics. I don't have any reason to doubt EmodE in the book of mormon, but this explanation for why it is there seems really out there.

Well I don’t think they’re really offering an explanation. Basically, they are sticking to descriptions of the translation/dictation  from insiders which indicate JS saw the words on the stone. Essentially, they are saying JS didn’t translate anything, he just recieved the text via revelation. I agree that doesn’t jive with JS’ claim to be a translator, but then again I think evidence usually points to JS not really translating in all the cases where he says he did.

[Exiled]

6 minutes ago, Benjamin Seeker said:

Well I don’t think they’re really offering an explanation. Basically, they are sticking to descriptions of the translation/dictation  from insiders which indicate JS saw the words on the stone. Essentially, they are saying JS didn’t translate anything, he just recieved the text via revelation. I agree that doesn’t jive with JS’ claim to be a translator, but then again I think evidence usually points to JS not really translating in all the cases where he says he did.

I think they are offering an explanation indirectly after the ghost committee fiasco.  Obviously, they must believe that there was a translation or composition by someone who knew EmodE prior to it being shown to Joseph Smith on his rock.

[SeekingUnderstanding]

22 hours ago, Benjamin Seeker said:

Part of the problem with this discussion is that the work being done by Skousen and Carmack is multifaceted. Skousen has been working on a cricitcal text project of the BOM since the 80s. He’s published his version of the Earliest Text with Yale. He’s also produced a bunch of volumes detailing all the changes in the text over the years and various editions, explaining  recommendations for the earliest readings, and analyzing the earliest text. The likelihood that JS could have authored the BOM text isn’t the main point of Skousen’s work. His main point is to describe the original English text of the BOM, to present the data in minute detail, etc. Carmack has worked as coauthor with Skousen on his volumes, particularly in the analysis of the text.

However, Carmack has also authored some of his own papers through interpreter. Some of these have focused on archaic syntax in the BOM text. At least one has dealt more directly with the likelihood of JS authoring the text by analyzing the syntax of JS’ 1832 history, part of which JS wrote and part of which he dictated. 

All of that being said, Skousen and Carmack both made that point at the lecture that due to the widespread use of archaic usage and syntax in the BOM, the usage matching the 1530s - 1730s and the syntax best matching the late 1500s, it is extremely unlikely that JS could have authored the text. They have looked for evidence of similar EmodE syntax and usage in sources available to JS such as the KJV as well as in sources representing hick 19th century dialect. They haven’t found it. Skousen didn’t press on the JS authorship issue very much at the lecture. However they did go to some length to show that the BOM is not copying KJV language in its syntax and grammar, and he did forcefully make the point that casual claims about the BOM being a mixture of pseudo KJV and JS’ back country dialect can no longer be taken seriously.

Hopefully this helps fill in some of the details.

 

Thanks for your write up. One thing I’ve never understood is if the Book of Mormon best matches late 1500’s English, why is it so readable?

Understanding Shakespeare is a struggle. Understanding many parts of the KJV Bible is a struggle. I’ve never struggled with the Book of Mormon when it comes to syntax and vocabulary. Is this because all the  archaic language was removed from later editions?

This is probably a dumb question, but any light anyone can shed on this would be appreciated. 

Edited September 28, 2018 by SeekingUnderstanding

[Calm]

12 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Thanks for your write up. One thing I’ve never understood is if the Book of Mormon best matches late 1500’s English, why is it so readable?

Understanding Shakespeare is a struggle. Understanding many parts of the KJV Bible is a struggle. I’ve never struggled with the Book of Mormon when it comes to syntax and vocabulary. Is this because all the  archaic language was removed from later editions?

This is probably a dumb question, but any light anyone can shed on this would be appreciated. 

It has a very limited vocabulary for one thing.

Quote

LDS researcher Benjamin McGuire has noted that while the Book of Mormon is roughly 270,000 words long, it has a vocabulary of only about 5,500 words. If we compare this to contemporary books of Joseph Smith’s day we find that Warren Ramsey’s The Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution had roughly as many words as the Book of Mormon but had a vocabulary 2.5 times greater than the Book of Mormon. Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days has only 1/3 as many words as the Book of Mormon, but has a vocabulary nearly 25% larger. Solomon Spalding wrote a novel that some critics claim was the original source for the Book of Mormon. That claim has been soundly refuted, but it’s interesting that Spalding’s manuscript is just under 15% the length of the Book of Mormon, but it has about the same sized vocabulary. The limited Book of Mormon vocabulary becomes even smaller when we remove the unique Book of Mormon names.8

https://www.fairmormon.org/archive/publications/horses-in-the-book-of-mormon

[JarMan]

1 hour ago, Exiled said:

So, if Joseph shouldn't be considered the author or translator, what should we make of the statement that Joseph himself said of translating the book of mormon by the gift and power of God?  Was he not telling the truth? Misled?  Also, why did he have to resort to a rock and hat when he just simply could have used available materials to him to translate the work from EmodE to modern english?  In reality, God could have had someone versed in EmodE and modern english to do the work instead of a backwoods farm boy.  Or better yet, why not just dictate the book like God did with the Book of Moses, supposedly?  Having the thing go through EmodE on its way to us seems far fetched but God seems to want to hide the ball, or at least allow the ball to be hidden by trusting the fallible. 

 

1 hour ago, Exiled said:

This doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever.  Why would God have someone else translate or compose some text and then force the text through the rock and hat?  Why not be more direct here?  Just have the original translator/composer step forward, without the theatrics. I don't have any reason to doubt EmodE in the book of mormon, but this explanation for why it is there seems really out there.

I'll try a naturalistic answer to some of your questions. The seer stone is just a stone. Joseph simply read a manuscript he had on his lap while he was pretending to read off a stone in his hat. The scribes couldn't see the manuscript because Joseph sat behind a table.

[Exiled]

21 minutes ago, JarMan said:

 

I'll try a naturalistic answer to some of your questions. The seer stone is just a stone. Joseph simply read a manuscript he had on his lap while he was pretending to read off a stone in his hat. The scribes couldn't see the manuscript because Joseph sat behind a table.

I agree that the seer stone was just an ordinary stone. Once that is established, the naturalistic answer seems the better one.

[stemelbow]

2 hours ago, Exiled said:

This doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever.  Why would God have someone else translate or compose some text and then force the text through the rock and hat?  Why not be more direct here?  Just have the original translator/composer step forward, without the theatrics. I don't have any reason to doubt EmodE in the book of mormon, but this explanation for why it is there seems really out there.

On top of that, you were correct in the first place.  That also means Joseph didn't translate anything.  And we're only further away from anything that Nephi and Moroni might have scratched on the plates.  

 

I don't get Carmack and Skousen's point here.  The presence of EModE moves us further away from the possibility that God was involved, it seems to me.  I thought the point of them presenting was to tell everyone that Joseph couldn't have done it, therefore it was God.  

[JarMan]

9 minutes ago, Exiled said:

I agree that the seer stone was just an ordinary stone. Once that is established, the naturalistic answer seems the better one.

If we assume the stone was just a stone, the next question is where Joseph got the text he dictated. It was either from his own mind or from an existing manuscript. The most likely of the two by far for a whole host of reasons is that it was from a manuscript. Skousen's and Carmack's work tell us when the manuscript was likely created. We should be looking in early modern times for an author. This simple line of reasoning is an example of letting the evidence and common sense drive the theory. The problem I keep seeing from both apologists and critics is that, instead, they want to make the evidence fit their theory using nonsensical reasoning.

 

[JarMan]

13 minutes ago, stemelbow said:

On top of that, you were correct in the first place.  That also means Joseph didn't translate anything.  And we're only further away from anything that Nephi and Moroni might have scratched on the plates.  

 

I don't get Carmack and Skousen's point here.  The presence of EModE moves us further away from the possibility that God was involved, it seems to me.  I thought the point of them presenting was to tell everyone that Joseph couldn't have done it, therefore it was God.  

I don't think this is Carmack's and Skousen's point. I think they have done legitimate scholarly research that shows EModE in the Book of Mormon. Imagine you're a respected BYU professor with a temple recommend and the support of the brethren. How do you present this scholarly evidence to the world? Certainly not by proclaiming that the research falsifies the church's view of the Book of Mormon. You have to present it in a way that either supports the traditional view or is agnostic about it. They started out more from the supporting side but have drifted towards agnosticism. They are in a funny position. I don't look at their work as being apologetic in nature. The spin may be apologetic, but the underlying work is scholarly and persuasive.

[Physics Guy]

5 hours ago, Benjamin Seeker said:

They did discuss some data at the lecture showing how the BOM often takes a contrasting approach to syntax for a given structure , and often (always?) that contrasting approach fits earlier EmodE. For example, in comparing “they that” vs. “they which” vs. “they who(m),” the mixture of uses in the KJV vs the BOM is nearly opposite, and the BOM mixture fits earlier EmodE.

Since your skeptical guess is pseudo-KJV, you may take the time to skim this article: https://www.mormoninterpreter.com/is-the-book-of-mormon-a-pseudo-archaic-text/. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve read it, but it is exactly the argument your dealing with.

This is the paper to which I was referring when I mentioned Carmack's effort to compare the Book of Mormon with a few pseudo-Biblical texts. The main point made in this paper is that the Book of Mormon uses some archaic constructions which are in the King James Bible at rates way higher than the King James Bible uses them, while the acknowledged pseudo-Biblical texts tend to use most of them much less. To conclude that the Book of Mormon is thereby proven not to be another pseudo-Biblical text seems like wild wishful thinking, however, when the obvious alternative interpretation of the data is that the better writers only used enough archaism to give their texts an amusing Biblical flavor, while the inexperienced author of the Book of Mormon poured it on thick.

At the end of his paper Carmack attempts to dismiss this theory (he refers to overdone archaism as "hypercorrection"), but his arguments seem weak to me. They are a piecemeal item-by-item defence of each usage he has considered, and many of the arguments are guardedly worded, as if Carmack himself finds them less than conclusive. They rely heavily on assuming that clumsy over-archaism would have to follow the patterns of the other pseudo-Biblical texts, which is an arbitrary assumption that seems dubious if one thinks about how those books were written, compared to how the Book of Mormon was written.

Carmack's rebuttals of "hypercorrection" also repeatedly appeal to the correspondence of Book of Mormon usage patterns with those of Early Modern English, as if the fact that an EModE speaker would have made similar patterns somehow makes it harder for Joseph Smith to have made them. His remaining arguments against "hypercorrection" are various assertions that in order to have produced some observed language pattern, Smith would have had to do something implausibly difficult. The feats in question do not strike me as particularly difficult and Carmack provides no evidence to show that they are difficult.

Edited September 28, 2018 by Physics Guy

[Benjamin Seeker]

51 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Thanks for your write up. One thing I’ve never understood is if the Book of Mormon best matches late 1500’s English, why is it so readable?

Understanding Shakespeare is a struggle. Understanding many parts of the KJV Bible is a struggle. I’ve never struggled with the Book of Mormon when it comes to syntax and vocabulary. Is this because all the  archaic language was removed from later editions?

This is probably a dumb question, but any light anyone can shed on this would be appreciated. 

There has been tons of editing to the BOM, starting with copying the printer’s manuscript, then by Grandin in printing the first edition, then JS preparing the second edition, and continued in the manu editions throughout the last nearly two centuries. That is one of the major points of Skousen’s decades long work, to document all of the changes as well as get back as close the original as possible. So, yeah they’re has been a lot of grammar editing.

[Benjamin Seeker]

2 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

This is the paper to which I was referring when I mentioned Carmack's effort to compare the Book of Mormon with a few pseudo-Biblical texts. The main point made in this paper is that the Book of Mormon uses some archaic constructions which are in the King James Bible at rates way higher than the King James Bible uses them, while the acknowledged pseudo-Biblical texts tend to use most of them much less. To conclude that the Book of Mormon is thereby proven not to be another pseudo-Biblical text seems like wild wishful thinking, however, when the obvious alternative interpretation of the data is that the better writers only used enough archaism to give their texts an amusing Biblical flavor, while the inexperienced author of the Book of Mormon poured it on thick.

At the end of his paper Carmack attempts to dismiss this theory (he refers to overdone archaism as "hypercorrection"), but his arguments seem weak to me. They are a piecemeal item-by-item defence of each usage he has considered, and many of the arguments are guardedly worded, as if Carmack himself finds them less than conclusive. They rely heavily on assuming that clumsy over-archaism would have to follow the patterns of the other pseudo-Biblical texts, which is an arbitrary assumption that seems dubious if one thinks about how those books were written, compared to how the Book of Mormon was written.

Carmack's rebuttals of "hypercorrection" also repeatedly appeal to the correspondence of Book of Mormon usage patterns with those of Early Modern English, as if the fact that an EModE speaker would have made similar patterns somehow makes it harder for Joseph Smith to have made them. His remaining arguments against "hypercorrection" are various assertions that in order to have produced some observed language pattern, Smith would have had to do something implausibly difficult. The feats in question do not strike me as particularly difficult and Carmack provides no evidence to show that they are difficult.

I do think you’re missing a few inportant points:

1. There is also a bunch of EmodE syntax in the BOM that is not in the KJV at all, so you can’t account for that via soley hyper correction.

2. Also, there are archaic meanings employed for words, which archaic meanings are not found in literature available to JS, and which JS and others around him demonstrate they don’t understand.

3. Part of Carmacks argument is that syntax and morpho syntax are part of our implicit knowledge and as such resists conscious manipulation since we aren’t aware of it. Carmack cites a bunch of literature to that effect. From his first footnote: See, for example, Nick C. Ellis, “Implicit and Explicit SLA and Their Interface” in Implicit and Explicit Language Learning: Conditions, Processes, and Knowledge in SLA and Bilingualism, eds. Cristina Sanz and Ronald P. Leow (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011), 35, 36: “Children … automatically acquire complex knowledge of the structure of their language;” “language skill is very different from knowledge about language;” and Bill VanPatten, “Stubborn Syntax: How It Resists Explicit Teaching and Learning,” in Implicit and Explicit Language Learning, 9–21. See also “The brain’s implicit knowledge of grammar is important for understanding spoken language,” National Aphasia Association, accessed December 20, 2017, https://www.aphasia.org/stories/the-brains-implicit-knowledge-of-grammar-is-important-for-understanding-spoken-language/.

 

[strappinglad]

So now you have Joseph with an EME manuscript, presumably hand written, but whatever, which he was able to use without Emma or Oliver or Martin ever seeing it. RIIIIIGht ! To translate generally means to transfer a message from one language to another . Whether that is done from a scholarly effort or, as JS said , by God's power is a side issue. We do have the story by Martin that he switched stones in the hat and Joseph was unable to ' translate' . That, if true, says something about the stone being special. To me, I see no problem with the BoM having been translated previously into English and that translation used for Joseph to read from. God's economy and all that. Critics claim that the BoM was a purely 19th century construct from Joseph's mind. This EME stuff puts a monkey wrench to that. As for who did the original translation into English and why, I have no firm idea but logic tells me it would be someone who was familiar with the Nephite language and English. I suggest one of the 3 Nephites, whom my father claims to have interacted with on one occasion. Hey, no crazier than a manuscript hidden on Joseph's lap !

[JarMan]

9 minutes ago, strappinglad said:

So now you have Joseph with an EME manuscript, presumably hand written, but whatever, which he was able to use without Emma or Oliver or Martin ever seeing it. RIIIIIGht ! To translate generally means to transfer a message from one language to another . Whether that is done from a scholarly effort or, as JS said , by God's power is a side issue. We do have the story by Martin that he switched stones in the hat and Joseph was unable to ' translate' . That, if true, says something about the stone being special. To me, I see no problem with the BoM having been translated previously into English and that translation used for Joseph to read from. God's economy and all that. Critics claim that the BoM was a purely 19th century construct from Joseph's mind. This EME stuff puts a monkey wrench to that. As for who did the original translation into English and why, I have no firm idea but logic tells me it would be someone who was familiar with the Nephite language and English. I suggest one of the 3 Nephites, whom my father claims to have interacted with on one occasion. Hey, no crazier than a manuscript hidden on Joseph's lap !

Hats and tables have long been used to do magic tricks.

It's said this trick was first performed in 1814.

[Rajah Manchou]

6 hours ago, JarMan said:

Hats and tables have long been used to do magic tricks....It's said this trick was first performed in 1814.

Ancient spiritual texts hidden in stone caskets in the earth have been appearing as words on glowing rocks since the 11th century. Awareness of this tradition was transmitted to Europe and America in the 1700s by a Jesuit priest named Ippolito Desideri, and later Emmanuel Swedenborg.

The hermetic saint who buried these golden texts lives eternally on a hill called Camara, known to medieval alchemists as Kumr, where Hermes/Enoch kept a golden book containing hidden antediluvian wisdom. Kumr is alternatively spelled as Comoro, and according to Arabic tradition was founded by a Middle Eastern warrior named Maroni. 

All this information would have been available in the 1820s to anybody with an interest in oriental freemasonry. 
 

Edited September 29, 2018 by Rajah Manchou

[Benjamin Seeker]

4 minutes ago, Rajah Manchou said:

Ancient spiritual texts hidden in stone caskets in the earth have been appearing as words on glowing rocks since the 11th century. Awareness of this tradition was transmitted to Europe and America in the 1700s by a Jesuit priest named Ippolito Desideri, and later Emmanuel Swedenborg.

The hermetic saint who buried these golden texts lives eternally on a hill called Camara, known to medieval alchemists as Kumr, where Hermes/Enoch kept a golden book containing hidden antediluvian wisdom. Kumr is alternatively spelled as Comoro, and according to Arabic tradition was founded by a Middle Eastern warrior named Maroni. 

All this information would have been available in the 1820s to anybody with an interest in oriental freemasonry.

I love when you say all this craziness. Can you provide some footnotes?

[Benjamin Seeker]

41 minutes ago, Rajah Manchou said:

Ancient spiritual texts hidden in stone caskets in the earth have been appearing as words on glowing rocks since the 11th century. Awareness of this tradition was transmitted to Europe and America in the 1700s by a Jesuit priest named Ippolito Desideri, and later Emmanuel Swedenborg.

The hermetic saint who buried these golden texts lives eternally on a hill called Camara, known to medieval alchemists as Kumr, where Hermes/Enoch kept a golden book containing hidden antediluvian wisdom. Kumr is alternatively spelled as Comoro, and according to Arabic tradition was founded by a Middle Eastern warrior named Maroni. 

All this information would have been available in the 1820s to anybody with an interest in oriental freemasonry. 
 

Nevermind on the footnotes. I’m looking through your old posts and finding lots of sources. I would like to see a source on the oriental freemasonry tie in though.

[Rajah Manchou]

37 minutes ago, Benjamin Seeker said:

I love when you say all this craziness. Can you provide some footnotes?

I'm working on a more detailed writeup on The Birth of Orientalism and Mormonism. But a good place to start is the wiki on Terma (Religion), which has some footnotes:

"In the Western world a similar tradition is held in Mormonism. Underwood notes, "[Joseph] Smith looks like an American terton-seer translating ancient [terma] texts written in cryptic Reformed Egyptian," like the dakini script, "by the great prophets of the past, Mormon and Moroni." Similar to Padmasambhava, the purpose cited by these prophets for hiding the texts for a future time was in "keeping the faith on track by making clear the fundamental 'plain and precious' principles of the tradition." And as mind-terma are "not physically discovered but are revealed through the mind of the terton," Joseph Smith's revelations of the prophecies of Enoch and the parchment of John did not have any direct physical source but were revealed through Smith's mind. Skousen contrasts Smith's work with the terma tradition, particularly the Book of Mormon, in claiming that Smith did not rely on "mindstream transmission," but was translating from a text written on gold plates.(1) However, witnesses note that Smith didn't use what was allegedly the gold plates during the translation, but translated by scrying with a seer stone in a hat, dictating the text as he saw it appear in his mind in a trance-like state of consciousness, suggesting a mystical translation with the text coming from Smith's mind." (source)

(1) Skousen, Royal, ed. (2009). The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text. Translated by Smith, Joseph. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. xxvi. ISBN 0300142188. OCLC 317471754.)

If you'd like to dig deeper into anything there, I can share notes.

Edited September 29, 2018 by Rajah Manchou

[Rajah Manchou]

9 minutes ago, Benjamin Seeker said:

Nevermind on the footnotes. I’m looking through your old posts and finding lots of sources. I would like to see a source on the oriental freemasonry tie in though.

The Birth of Orientalism
Urs App
568 pages | 6 x 9 | 20 illus. 
Paper 2015 | ISBN 9780812223460

The chapters on Chevalier Ramsay, JZ Holwell, and Jacob Ilive in particular.

Ilive "translated" the Pseudo-Book of Jasher in the 1700s. It was re-published in the UK just before the Book of Mormon (1829). Even though it has been identified as a psuedo-Biblical forgery, the Rosicrucians republished it as an inspired text. Ilive's Book of Jasher is full of "and it came to pass" and failed archaisms. It would be interesting to word crunch it.

Edited September 29, 2018 by Rajah Manchou

[Physics Guy]

9 hours ago, Benjamin Seeker said:

1. There is also a bunch of EmodE syntax in the BOM that is not in the KJV at all, so you can’t account for that via soley hyper correction.

2. Also, there are archaic meanings employed for words, which archaic meanings are not found in literature available to JS, and which JS and others around him demonstrate they don’t understand.

3. Part of Carmacks argument is that syntax and morpho syntax are part of our implicit knowledge and as such resists conscious manipulation since we aren’t aware of it. Carmack cites a bunch of literature to that effect.

1. This is why I mentioned productivity. A priori it's not just plausible but likely that someone trying to fake King James language would get a few rules wrong and produce some non-KJV syntax by mistake, the way people learning a new language make mistakes. 

2. It's not as though we've discovered that "curelom" was the standard Early Modern word for "tapir". Other than the clearly non-English words, whatever words are in the Book of Mormon did somehow make sense to people in 1830. So either the old definitions survived in backwoods dialect, or the text also made sense with the new definitions.

3. "A bunch of literature" is a drop in the ocean on this topic, which is the basic subject of modern linguistics. It's clear that a lot of language goes on subconsciously, but it's obviously not true that people cannot consciously change the way they speak or write. People learn new languages, learn new dialects, adopt new styles; actors get into character, and authors write characters with distinctive voices. It's not that hard to speak consistently like Yoda, for instance; after a bit of working into it, keep it up indefinitely you can.

Sure, Book of Mormon syntax might be harder than Yoda-speak. The point is, there is no general linguistic principle which says that people can't put on fake dialects. If you want to say Smith could not have written the Book of Mormon because the human language faculty just doesn't allow it, then you need to show a lot of evidence about just why this particular example of deliberate language change would be beyond the known capacity of the human brain.

Edited September 29, 2018 by Physics Guy

[Benjamin Seeker]

9 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

1. This is why I mentioned productivity. A priori it's not just plausible but likely that someone trying to fake King James language would get a few rules wrong and produce some non-KJV syntax by mistake, the way people learning a new language make mistakes. 

2. It's not as though we've discovered that "curelom" was the standard Early Modern word for "tapir". Other than the clearly non-English words, whatever words are in the Book of Mormon did somehow make sense to people in 1830. So either the old definitions survived in backwoods dialect, or the text also made sense with the new definitions.

Actually, curelom is the EmodE transliteration of the Reformed Egyptian word for hippopotamus. ;^) That being said, edits were made to words that didn’t make sense as early as copying from the original to the printer’s manuscript, then in the actual type setting, and then by JS in preparation for the 2nd edition (I believe I’ve got that all correct).

Quote

3. "A bunch of literature" is a drop in the ocean on this topic, which is the basic subject of modern linguistics. It's clear that a lot of language goes on subconsciously, but it's obviously not true that people cannot consciously change the way they speak or write. People learn new languages, learn new dialects, adopt new styles; actors get into character, and authors write characters with distinctive voices. It's not that hard to speak consistently like Yoda, for instance; after a bit of working into it, keep it up indefinitely you can.

Sure, Book of Mormon syntax might be harder than Yoda-speak. The point is, there is no general linguistic principle which says that people can't put on fake dialects. If you want to say Smith could not have written the Book of Mormon because the human language faculty just doesn't allow it, then you need to show a lot of evidence about just why this particular example of deliberate language change would be beyond the known capacity of the human brain.

I do like you point that the combination of hypercorrection and productivity could have created BOM grammar. I would like to see another linguist weigh in. Carmack is the only linguist I’ve seen interpreting the data so far. There is a lot of data, a lot of non-KJV archaic syntax, so it would be nice to have another linguist’s opinion on the likelihood that it was all created via productivity along with the EmodE appropriate use of KJV syntax via hypercorrection.

 

Edited September 29, 2018 by Benjamin Seeker

[Physics Guy]

Right: this is why this stuff needs to get some proper linguistic peer review before anybody takes it very seriously. There are basic questions that can be raised about it which seem to throw it all into doubt. Peer review by a mainstream journal would bring in some real experts, and they would be selected by an editor at random (from a qualified pool) rather than being self-selected due to interest in Mormonism (whether for or against).

I certainly don't assume that I as an amateur linguist-by-marriage have shot down all Skousen's work. At this point it's entirely possible that all of Skousen's and Carmack's work is very solid, and the basic questions also have basic answers which they, being too used to dealing with specialists, did not think of mentioning. This would be an error of omission on their part, but it's an error that specialists frequently make even when they've done everything else very well. Reminding specialist authors to fill this kind of presentational gap is one of the things that peer review often does.

It does also seem possible at this point, however, that the whole EModE-BofM thing is a mirage. It would be far from the first time that some specialists got carried away with their specialized methodology and overlooked basic flaws that made all of it pointless. That kind of thing happens all the time, with scholars and scientists who have credentials every bit as genuine as those of Skousen and Carmack, and who have done just as much legwork that looks just as impressive to lay readers.

Proper technical peer review is not just a nice-to-have formality such that we can go on counting Skousen's and Carmack's conclusions as firmly established until they get around to acquiring the due rubber stamp. Until we get proper peer review by neutral experts, the whole EModE deal is just an unconfirmed suggestion—no matter how real their academic credentials are, and no matter how much seemingly substantial work they have done.

[champatsch]

Time for a few comments. In reading what Physics Guy has to say, I found some of it misleading. If you look at the pseudo-archaic paper on Interpreter, you will see that in almost every case presented the Book of Mormon is different from both the King James Bible and the pseudo-biblical texts in its patterns, and you will see that no matter how we slice things, the Book of Mormon is impressively archaic, far beyond the pseudo-biblical texts, and usually beyond the King James Bible. There are also things mentioned in the paper that are in neither the King James Bible or pseudo-biblical texts. PG seems to have done his best to downplay or ignore these details.

In my later writings, I don't think that I use the adjective difficult to describe Joseph Smith dictating the the Book of Mormon's English. I try to use terms of probability such as "(highly/extremely) unlikely". When I haven't done this, there is either a particular reason for it or I have slipped up. In any event, I think probability terms are the better descriptors to use.

Example 1.  Consider the Book of Mormon's "more part" phraseology. It is always different from the two found in Acts, and the pseudo-biblical texts don't use the phraseology at all. So naturally we don't expect that Joseph would have used more than a few of these, not two dozen, and that these few would have been biblical in formation. That is indisputably not the case. Rather, the Book of Mormon is the first text in 252 years, since Holinshed's Chronicles, to have such high levels and varied usage. The Book of Mormon has two rare early modern variants (three examples). It has four variants total. It is a philological achievement for the year 1829, and from what I have seen, it has never been surpassed afterwards. It was either highly unlikely or extremely unlikely for Joseph to have produced all the "more part" phraseology of the 1829 dictation.

Example 2.  Consider the Book of Mormon's "had (been) spake" phraseology. This isn't in either the King James Bible or the pseudo-biblical texts. From my current research, the Book of Mormon has the second most instances of spake used as a past participle in the textual record, after a 1646 by John Bastwick, which has 31. "Had been spake", occurring once in the Book of Mormon at Alma 6:8 is a rare variant that I have encountered three times, all of them in the 1600s. Another philological achievement.

Example 3.  This one isn't in the paper. The King James Bible frequently uses that after subordinating conjunctions such as after or how. These are the two kinds that the dozen or so pseudo-biblical texts I have looked at picked up on and emulated. The Book of Mormon goes beyond that, with "before that" and "because that", which I haven't found in pseudo-biblical texts yet. Also, the Book of Mormon has "since that", which isn't found in the King James Bible, and even "to that", meaning 'until'.

There are many more of these, and perhaps I will write up a general paper one day and submit it to an appropriate journal that publishes a lot of descriptive Early Modern English material.

[Physics Guy]

I'm sorry if I've misled people about your work. I didn't mean to do that. I do mean to avoid details, however, and press you to talk about the premises by which you draw your conclusions from your details. I think that there are some basic questions which you haven't addressed. As I said just above, perhaps you just forgot to explain them.

One is: why should we expect the few acknowledged pseudo-Biblical texts which you studied to be like the Book of Mormon? They are similar in sounding somewhat Biblical, but beyond that, they are texts of a very different kind. Their authors were more educated than Joseph Smith is supposed to have been; they were written in the usual way, rather than being copied from impromptu dictation; and they were not written with any pretense of being genuinely Biblical, or with any intent to conceal the true author's identity. It's certainly due diligence on your part to have looked at these other texts, since they are something that can be checked, so why not check them. But is it reasonable to take them as a baseline for all possible 19th century efforts at imitating the King James Bible?

Another is: why should we expect an amateur imitation of the King James Bible to be free of errors through which non-KJB syntax appears? Don't you need to show, of examples of syntax that never appears in the KJB, that there is no way Smith could have produced them by mistake? Forgive me for belaboring something basic, but just to avoid wasting time, the fact that 16th century writers would have made these constructions correctly says nothing at all about whether Joseph Smith could have made them as errors in an attempt at KJB.

Quote

 If you look at the pseudo-archaic paper on Interpreter, you will see that in almost every case presented the Book of Mormon is different from both the King James Bible and the pseudo-biblical texts in its patterns, and you will see that no matter how we slice things, the Book of Mormon is impressively archaic, far beyond the pseudo-biblical texts, and usually beyond the King James Bible. There are also things mentioned in the paper that are in neither the King James Bible or pseudo-biblical texts. 

If you read my posts in this thread you will see that I acknowledged both these points of yours explicitly. I challenged your apparent assumptions that the pseudo-Biblical texts you examined were representative of all possible Biblical imitation, that being more archaic than the KJB means more than what you call hypercorrection, and that we should not expect an imitator to make productive errors generating things that don't appear in the KJB.

Perhaps you can answer all those challenges, but I didn't notice clear answers to them in your paper. Did I overlook something you wrote?

And, while you're here: why haven't you guys brought this stuff out in a mainstream journal yet? Have you tried and been rejected? If so, what did the referees not like? I'm skeptical of your thesis, but prepared to believe you can support it, and I'm certainly sympathetic about stupid responses from referees. How many times have you revised your paper and tried again? There are plenty of journals, and you can usually find one with sensible referees, if you try a few times. There's no shame in getting a few rejections along the way, but if this never comes out in a mainstream journal, at some point it will become hard to take your conclusions seriously, you know?

Edited September 30, 2018 by Physics Guy

[Daniel Peterson]

On September 28, 2018 at 12:05 PM, Exiled said:

I think they are offering an explanation indirectly after the ghost committee fiasco.  Obviously, they must believe that there was a translation or composition by someone who knew EmodE prior to it being shown to Joseph Smith on his rock.

There was no "ghost committee fiasco."  That's the fictional creation of a very small group of quite hostile people on a very hostile message board who haven't even troubled themselves to really follow the argument.