Skousen & Carmack Lecture Take Aways

[Daniel Peterson]

On September 28, 2018 at 1:42 PM, JarMan said:

 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.

Trust me on this:  Royal Skousen believes the Book of Mormon to be a divinely revealed ancient text.  He certainly isn't drifting toward agnosticism on that point -- and if there's anybody on Planet Earth less inclined to disingenuousness and/or to flattering leaders than Royal is, I haven't met (and can scarcely conceive of) that person.

Incidentally, too, Stan Carmack doesn't teach at BYU and doesn't even live in Utah.

 

[Benjamin Seeker]

8 minutes ago, Daniel Peterson said:

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.

Just to be clear, there was speculation on who could have been a hypothetical translator or translators on the other side of the veil, but those comments weren’t meant to be taken as a part of the scholarship. Do I have that all right?

Edited September 30, 2018 by Benjamin Seeker

[JarMan]

3 hours ago, Daniel Peterson said:

Trust me on this:  Royal Skousen believes the Book of Mormon to be a divinely revealed ancient text.  He certainly isn't drifting toward agnosticism on that point -- and if there's anybody on Planet Earth less inclined to disingenuousness and/or to flattering leaders than Royal is, I haven't met (and can scarcely conceive of) that person.

Incidentally, too, Stan Carmack doesn't teach at BYU and doesn't even live in Utah.

 

I feared my comment was going to be taken this way. I don't have any reason to doubt the sincerity of Skousen nor do I think he disbelieves in the divinity of the Book of Mormon. What I think he is "agnostic" about (or at least drifting toward agnosticism regarding) is the reason for the EModE in the Book of Mormon. At first he touted EModE as support for the divinity of the Book of Mormon. After all, how could Joseph have accomplished that? Recently he's taken a more measured approach along the lines of, We don't know what it means that there's EModE in the Book of Mormon but we know it's in there. His soon to be published list of items that he believes aren't early modern are along that line since that list seems to contradict the idea the Book of Mormon is exclusively an early modern document. The reason I even brought this up was to argue against the notion that the whole idea of showing EModE in the Book of Mormon is some kind of apologetic ploy that can't be taken seriously since it was born out of apologetic fervor rather than legitimate scholarly interest.

[Exiled]

20 hours ago, Benjamin Seeker said:

Just to be clear, there was speculation on who could have been a hypothetical translator or translators on the other side of the veil, but those comments weren’t meant to be taken as a part of the scholarship. Do I have that all right?

I think the speculation by Skousen happened at a 2014 book of mormon archaeological foundation conference. This article mentions the conference 

https://osaywhatistruth.org/2017/11/14/who-translated-the-book-of-mormon-text-into-english-for-joseph-smith-to-read/

I tried to find the youtube video but it is not on the bmaf site or on the bookofmormoncentral site.

The next year Mr. Skousen mentions how he changed his mind at the end of his interpreter conference presentation.

https://interpreterfoundation.org/conferences/2015-exploring-the-complexities-in-the-english-language-of-the-book-of-mormon/2015-exploring-complexities-conference-videos/

Edited October 1, 2018 by Exiled

[Ben U]

I was fortunate enough to be at this lecture, and it should be pointed out that Skousen read most of the conclusions — including the "creative translation" material — directly from his article that will be published in the next BYU Studies (57:3, I believe). He deliberately switched from off-script to on-script when he transitioned into this section of his seminar. So before we put too many carts ahead of our horses, we may simply want to wait until we can see exactly what it is Skousen is asserting here. 

Dan is right to say that Skousen is a believer; it's clear from the way he presented his material on Tuesday that this research has served to deepen that belief. At the same time, he clearly regrets having speculated on authorship (more carts, more horses), found no benefit in doing so, and discouraged the rest of us from burrowing down similar tunnels. His findings do spark the imagination, though.

[champatsch]

13 hours ago, JarMan said:

I feared my comment was going to be taken this way. I don't have any reason to doubt the sincerity of Skousen nor do I think he disbelieves in the divinity of the Book of Mormon. What I think he is "agnostic" about (or at least drifting toward agnosticism regarding) is the reason for the EModE in the Book of Mormon. At first he touted EModE as support for the divinity of the Book of Mormon. After all, how could Joseph have accomplished that? Recently he's taken a more measured approach along the lines of, We don't know what it means that there's EModE in the Book of Mormon but we know it's in there. His soon to be published list of items that he believes aren't early modern are along that line since that list seems to contradict the idea the Book of Mormon is exclusively an early modern document. The reason I even brought this up was to argue against the notion that the whole idea of showing EModE in the Book of Mormon is some kind of apologetic ploy that can't be taken seriously since it was born out of apologetic fervor rather than legitimate scholarly interest.

If I ever wrote that the Book of Mormon was exclusively an early modern text, then that was a mistake. I haven't always been clear, but I know that several times I have stated that the Book of Mormon is mostly early modern, and I have been primarily thinking about the verb phrase rather than the noun phrase, but probably haven't been sufficiently clear on that point either. Non-linguists usually think in terms of the Book of Mormon's noun phrases and use the Google Books Ngram Viewer to get an idea of usage trends. However, many pre-1750 rates in the Ngram Viewer are unreliable. And that skews the view of things leading up to 1829. (I've shown before in another thread some of the perils of the NV.)  Generally speaking, it is much more reliable to think in terms of the verb phrase when categorizing the nature of Book of Mormon English.

[champatsch]

On 9/30/2018 at 10:58 AM, Physics Guy said:

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.

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?

I just spoke to the last item. So far I have just shown some of my work to an independent linguist I had dealings with in the 1990s.

On the first part, what we have in the Book of Mormon is deeper archaism than is found in pseudo-biblical texts in quite a few domains. So if you feel comfortable that Joseph could have done this many times over, if you feel comfortable with a high level of coincidence with attested archaism, then you can accept him as author. This archaism overlaps with the King James Bible in some cases, and does not overlap in some cases. One of the latter is the Book of Mormon's relatively heavy use of the modal auxiliary shall in verb complements. Although not (pseudo)biblical in nature, uncommon matches with external textual usage exist in the modern period, so one could say that Joseph exhibited literacy with some of his archaic syntax, for example, combining complex finite complementation with modal shall. In some cases there is a pattern difference, and the pattern was rare, archaic, and non-persisting. An example of this is the personal relative pronoun profile of the Book of Mormon — involving more than one thousand instances — something that was extremely unlikely for Joseph to have produced from his own biblically influenced language.

Although there are individual cases that seem quite unlikely for Joseph to have produced by mistake, the case can always be made for mistake, as long as one is creative, since language does work by analogy. Multiple analogical steps can be described. And as long as you're comfortable with many unlikely analogical hits, you can think of Book of Mormon syntax as a whole in that way. An individual example that I have mentioned before is "he will cause it that it shall soon overtake you" (3n2904), which is a perfect syntactic match with a 1701 example. This can be analogized to complex finite command syntax, which persisted (barely) into the 1800s (though not with a repeated it). The odd repeated it could be analogized to repeated personal pronouns with the verbs command or suffer, the modal shall could be attributed to uncommon, formal modern usage. Etc.

Edited October 1, 2018 by champatsch

[JarMan]

4 hours ago, champatsch said:

If I ever wrote that the Book of Mormon was exclusively an early modern text, then that was a mistake. I haven't always been clear, but I know that several times I have stated that the Book of Mormon is mostly early modern, and I have been primarily thinking about the verb phrase rather than the noun phrase, but probably haven't been sufficiently clear on that point either. Non-linguists usually think in terms of the Book of Mormon's noun phrases and use the Google Books Ngram Viewer to get an idea of usage trends. However, many pre-1750 rates in the Ngram Viewer are unreliable. And that skews the view of things leading up to 1829. (I've shown before in another thread some of the perils of the NV.)  Generally speaking, it is much more reliable to think in terms of the verb phrase when categorizing the nature of Book of Mormon English.

You have mentioned the possibility that the text is EModE but was reworked at a later date. I am very interested to read Skousen's article when it comes out in the new issue of BYU Studies Quarterly to see what things he thinks are not a good match for EModE. I suspect some (or all) of these things will turn out to be possibly early modern in origin but with a French or Latin connection. An English-speaking early modern scholar would have certainly known Latin and would almost certainly have known French.

[Physics Guy]

Thanks very much for the answer. What you say sounds reasonable (to me as a lay person in your field), but I have to say that it also sounds well short of a conclusive case against Smith's authorship.

"A high level of coincidence with attested archaism" is indeed fairly easy to accept, if there is a natural mechanism to account for the data. That is, the observed syntactic patterns would not then be "just coincidence"; they would be the systematic results of hypercorrection in a work that was written in a very different way from the way other pseudo-Biblical texts were written, and for a very different purpose. The coincidence with which a skeptic would be comfortable would be the coincidence that this systematic hypercorrection happened to look like Early Modern grammar. After all, Early Modern English is simply an older dialect of English than the King James Version.

The case for mistake (as a way of explaining features not found in King James) did seem to me to be one that would be very hard to rule out, because just as you say, the scope for creative analogies which could account for Smith producing structure X by mistaken analogy with structure Y would seem to be vast. How "many unlikely analogical hits" would be needed sounds subjective to me, however.  I can accept that you are calling it as you see it, but if a non-Mormon ventured to ask for a second opinion from another linguist, I don't feel that this would be a rude disrespect for your own expertise. It seems to be a judgement call, and judgements differ.

Between these two points, it sounds to me as though a reasonable linguist who simply happened to make somewhat different probability estimates from yours could well re-analyze your data and conclude that the Book of Mormon language could have been produced by Joseph Smith after all. Would you agree with this, or do you feel that you have presented a conclusive case which ought to convince any of your non-Mormon peers?

Edited October 1, 2018 by Physics Guy

[Stargazer]

On 9/28/2018 at 7:34 AM, Physics Guy said:

This is just a shot in the dark, but I've been wondering about it. Are Mormon apologists who are trying to use Skousen's work aware that language is productive?

 

Not trying to answer you here, just using your text to get your attention.

Have you ever read Bill Bryson's book, "The Mother Tongue - English, and How it Got That Way"?  It's not technically linguistic, a saving grace no doubt, but I've been re-reading it recently (in audible form) and have found it very entertaining and instructive in how English has evolved over the past couple of thousand years.  Bryson touches on things related to how we sometimes read old words and expressions that think they mean X when they have evolved and now mean Y.  I'm just putting it out there as a useful sourcebook that I've found useful.

Now back to the argumentation.

[Ryan Dahle]

2 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

Thanks very much for the answer. What you say sounds reasonable (to me as a lay person in your field), but I have to say that it also sounds well short of a conclusive case against Smith's authorship.

"A high level of coincidence with attested archaism" is indeed fairly easy to accept, if there is a natural mechanism to account for the data. That is, the observed syntactic patterns would not then be "just coincidence"; they would be the systematic results of hypercorrection in a work that was written in a very different way from the way other pseudo-Biblical texts were written, and for a very different purpose. The coincidence with which a skeptic would be comfortable would be the coincidence that this systematic hypercorrection happened to look like Early Modern grammar. After all, Early Modern English is simply an older dialect of English than the King James Version.

The case for mistake (as a way of explaining features not found in King James) did seem to me to be one that would be very hard to rule out, because just as you say, the scope for creative analogies which could account for Smith producing structure X by mistaken analogy with structure Y would seem to be vast. How "many unlikely analogical hits" would be needed sounds subjective to me, however.  I can accept that you are calling it as you see it, but if a non-Mormon ventured to ask for a second opinion from another linguist, I don't feel that this would be a rude disrespect for your own expertise. It seems to be a judgement call, and judgements differ.

Between these two points, it sounds to me as though a reasonable linguist who simply happened to make somewhat different probability estimates from yours could well re-analyze your data and conclude that the Book of Mormon language could have been produced by Joseph Smith after all. Would you agree with this, or do you feel that you have presented a conclusive case which ought to convince any of your non-Mormon peers?

I think the problem is that if one is just playing around with analogical variations to hopefully sound archaic, one is probably going to come up with a lot of usage unattested anywhere else in the English language. Without implicit knowledge of earlier forms of English, every analogical improvisation would be a shot in the dark, probably more likely to be without EModE precedent than to be with precedent. 

Edited October 1, 2018 by Ryan Dahle

[Physics Guy]

That's one guess about how it would work, all right. I don't think it actually works that way, though. As has been said, there are a lot of subconscious constraints on language. When kids make mistakes in speech, there's almost always some rhyme and reason to the mistakes. So if a native speaker of 1800's backwoods New England dialect (whatever that actually was) starts aiming to imitate the King James Bible, they're going to make mistakes, but not mistakes that come out sounding like Swahili.

There is some implicit knowledge of earlier forms of English, in everyone who speaks any form of English, because English may have evolved unpredictably, but the evolution has not just been entirely random. Things changed in certain systematic ways, and if a native speaker of some form of English makes an uneducated guess at how English changed, I think their guess is more likely to go wrong by landing earlier on the actual evolutionary history of English than it is to go wrong by landing somewhere completely off the historical track.

So that's my take as a non-expert, which isn't necessarily worth any more than your take. There's enough of a question here, though, that it really needs some serious threshing out by experts. It is not just an open-and-shut case to say that Smith could not have produced the oddities of Book of Mormon grammar through a combination of deliberate hypercorrection and inadvertent mistake.

Edited October 2, 2018 by Physics Guy

[Peppermint Patty]

Champatsch,

I just read the following comment on the Interpreter's website.  Was the oral dialect of Joseph Smith something you and Professor Skousen took into consideration when conducting your research?  If so, how did you reconcile your research with the 1600 century oral dialect that Joseph Smith would have likely used?

  https://interpreterfoundation.org/celebrating-two-new-books-in-the-book-of-mormon-critical-text-project/

 

Quote

Brad on September 30, 2018 at 12:47 pm

 

4 years after Joseph Smith died, this book was published:

Dictionary of Americanisms, A Glossary of Words and Phrases, Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States, by John Russell Bartlett, 1848

And on page iii I read this:

“On comparing these familiar words with the provincial and colloquial language of the northern counties of England, a most striking resemblance appeared, not only in the words commonly regarded as peculiar to New England, but in the dialectical pronunciation of certain words, and in the general tone and accent. In fact, it may be said, without exaggeration, that nine tenths of the colloquial peculiarities of New England are derived from Great Britain; and that they are now provincial in those parts from which the early colonists emigrated, or are to be found in the writings of well accredited authors of the period when that emigration took place.

It may be insisted, therefore, that the idiom of New England is as pure English, taken as a whole, as was spoken in England at the period when these colonies were settled.”

https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofamer00bart/page/n5

It was a known fact in the 1800s that spoken, not written, English in the Eastern states was different from the English written and spoken in Great Britain. And its form was closest to the same spoken type of English of the early 1600s when the first colonists arrived.

Skousen and Carmack have proposed that Joseph Smith could not have known the grammar of an earlier English period. However, in actuality, published writings of the 19th century show that Joseph Smith very likely would have spoken in such a way in casual conversation.

 

Edited October 3, 2018 by Peppermint Patty

[clarkgoble]

12 hours ago, Peppermint Patty said:

I just read the following comment on the Interpreter's website.  Was the oral dialect of Joseph Smith something you and Professor Skousen took into consideration when conducting your research?  If so, how did you reconcile your research with the 1600 century oral dialect that Joseph Smith would have likely used?

  https://interpreterfoundation.org/celebrating-two-new-books-in-the-book-of-mormon-critical-text-project/

I think part of the problem is that there weren't good oral ethnographic projects. So claiming it's 16th century speech requires a bit more. However I've long said this is the main problem with Skousen's and Carmack's argument in that it deals just with written not oral corpuses. 

The problem with the linked to book is that is deals with short phrase segments rather than grammar.  To the degree it gives examples of these in example sentences they are from books that would already have been in the corpuses Skousen and Carmack have already used.

The main point of attack for their theory is to find some ethnographic studies from the late 19th century in New England that have the characteristics they find in the Book of Mormon. Not being a linguist I don't know how available such studies are for early 19th century. There certainly are studies of rural New England from the early 20th century. Although doing a quick Google it looks like most of those focus on word/phrase pronunciation and not the more extended grammatical considerations that Skousen and Carmack are focused on. 

Again, recognizing I'm anything but well versed in this field, looking at the notes for some of the studies at Yale, it seems like letters to the editor are usually taken to be a good representation of oral grammar. There are corpuses of that already available for the relevant time periods. It looks like Jack Grieve has quite a few corpuses there - although I'm not sure if those include early 19th century. (Not being at an university it's often hard to see these things as usually they're restricted to those associated with a college library - BYU won't give library cards to non-students or professors) It looks like this paper gives a good overview of 19th century corpuses. I'd imagine that the most useful would be letter and trial proceedings as the latter in particular records oral dialogue. Further the very nature of trials entails a cross section of more demographic diversity than we're apt to get in other genres. While not as relevant to New England, there is also the Bailey Corpus which does this for trials in London from 1674 - 1913.

I'd assume that Carmack is aware of all this though.

Edited October 3, 2018 by clarkgoble

[Exiled]

15 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

I think part of the problem is that there weren't good oral ethnographic projects. So claiming it's 16th century speech requires a bit more. However I've long said this is the main problem with Skousen's and Carmack's argument in that it deals just with written not oral corpuses. 

The problem with the linked to book is that is deals with short phrase segments rather than grammar.  To the degree it gives examples of these in example sentences they are from books that would already have been in the corpuses Skousen and Carmack have already used.

The main point of attack for their theory is to find some ethnographic studies from the late 19th century in New England that have the characteristics they find in the Book of Mormon. Not being a linguist I don't know how available such studies are for early 19th century. There certainly are studies of rural New England from the early 20th century. Although doing a quick Google it looks like most of those focus on word/phrase pronunciation and not the more extended grammatical considerations that Skousen and Carmack are focused on. 

Again, recognizing I'm anything but well versed in this field, looking at the notes for some of the studies at Yale, it seems like letters to the editor are usually taken to be a good representation of oral grammar. There are corpuses of that already available for the relevant time periods. It looks like Jack Grieve has quite a few corpuses there - although I'm not sure if those include early 19th century. (Not being at an university it's often hard to see these things as usually they're restricted to those associated with a college library - BYU won't give library cards to non-students or professors) It looks like this paper gives a good overview of 19th century corpuses. I'd imagine that the most useful would be letter and trial proceedings as the latter in particular records oral dialogue. Further the very nature of trials entails a cross section of more demographic diversity than we're apt to get in other genres. While not as relevant to New England, there is also the Bailey Corpus which does this for trials in London from 1674 - 1913.

I'd assume that Carmack is aware of all this though.

I am interested to see what Skousen/Carmack have to say on this subject since the book of mormon was dictated. Court records seem to be an avenue where authentic speech would show up, as you say, assuming the scribe is faithful. Some linguists have said that isolated populations in the appalachian mountains and Ozarks, today, have speech resembling Elizabethian English.

[Analytics]

21 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

I think part of the problem is that there weren't good oral ethnographic projects. So claiming it's 16th century speech requires a bit more. However I've long said this is the main problem with Skousen's and Carmack's argument in that it deals just with written not oral corpuses. 

The problem with the linked to book is that is deals with short phrase segments rather than grammar.  To the degree it gives examples of these in example sentences they are from books that would already have been in the corpuses Skousen and Carmack have already used.

The main point of attack for their theory is to find some ethnographic studies from the late 19th century in New England that have the characteristics they find in the Book of Mormon. Not being a linguist I don't know how available such studies are for early 19th century. There certainly are studies of rural New England from the early 20th century. Although doing a quick Google it looks like most of those focus on word/phrase pronunciation and not the more extended grammatical considerations that Skousen and Carmack are focused on. 

Again, recognizing I'm anything but well versed in this field, looking at the notes for some of the studies at Yale, it seems like letters to the editor are usually taken to be a good representation of oral grammar. There are corpuses of that already available for the relevant time periods. It looks like Jack Grieve has quite a few corpuses there - although I'm not sure if those include early 19th century. (Not being at an university it's often hard to see these things as usually they're restricted to those associated with a college library - BYU won't give library cards to non-students or professors) It looks like this paper gives a good overview of 19th century corpuses. I'd imagine that the most useful would be letter and trial proceedings as the latter in particular records oral dialogue. Further the very nature of trials entails a cross section of more demographic diversity than we're apt to get in other genres. While not as relevant to New England, there is also the Bailey Corpus which does this for trials in London from 1674 - 1913.

I'd assume that Carmack is aware of all this though.

My impression is that the Dictionary of Americanisms: A Glossary of Words and Phrases, Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States establishes that the colloquial English of New England in the early 1800's was distinct from other English dialects, but isn't as peculiar as one might think and bears resemblance to the Britannica English of the New Englander's pilgrim ancestors. Furthermore, the colloquial, oral dialect of English in the early 1800's isn't definitively understood--there just aren't any audio recordings of the way farmers from Vermont talked to each other, and there aren't that many transcripts of the actual oral speech of such people. But one such transcription is the Book of Mormon, which was in fact dictated by a New Englander in the early 1800's. If there is evidence that the Book of Mormon contains apparent archaisms that couldn't have been gleaned from the Bible, that is evidence that they really aren't actual archaisms, but rather are features of colloquial English in the early 1800's. That is the most direct, obvious, and natural interpretation. Or at least it seems that way to me.

[clarkgoble]

14 minutes ago, Analytics said:

My impression is that the Dictionary of Americanisms: A Glossary of Words and Phrases, Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States establishes that the colloquial English of New England in the early 1800's was distinct from other English dialects, but isn't as peculiar as one might think and bears resemblance to the Britannica English of the New Englander's pilgrim ancestors. 

It doesn't get into grammar though that I can see.

Doing a bit more search ARCHER includes both spoken and written works from 1600 - 1999. I know Carmack primarily relies on EEBO which is books not oral. 

 

 

[champatsch]

NOL is primarily concerned with the lexical usage of the Book of Mormon. The online, third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was relied on, with extra research performed in quite a few cases. For example, hinderment is quoted in an early 1800s book as occurring in an early 1600s text, but it turned out to be an incorrect reading of hindrance (because of a very difficult old secretary hand). It took many hours of work and many volunteers in Scotland to determine that. It would be useful to gather the last-dated OED citations for each archaic lexical item, and cross-check the items in this Dictionary of Americanisms. Who knows, maybe one or two lexical items will have relevant entries in the dictionary. But the OED has many entries of Americanisms in it, and those would have been checked for NOL.

Two sections of NOL deal with a limited amount of syntax. That is quite different from what is in this dictionary. It is my experience that commenters don't think in terms of the syntax, which I think is the most important evidence of all, and supports the view of obsolete lexis. So why do I think it's the most important evidence? It's less contextual, found in all genres, trends are trackable over time, subconsciously produced, massively represented, quantifiable. You get the picture. So when we see that "but if" in the Book of Mormon seems to mean 'unless' (in one case: mh0319), and note that the OED gives a 1590s example as the last one, the fact that there are many late 1500s nonbiblical syntactic patterns and structures in the Book of Mormon supports the obsolete meaning.

Edited October 3, 2018 by champatsch
mh0319

[Exiled]

3 minutes ago, champatsch said:

NOL is primarily concerned with the lexical usage of the Book of Mormon. The online, third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was relied on, with extra research performed in quite a few cases. For example, hinderment is quoted in an early 1800s book as occurring in an early 1600s text, but it turned out to be an incorrect reading of hindrance (because of a very difficult old secretary hand). It took many hours of work and many volunteers in Scotland to determine that. It would be useful to gather the last-dated OED citations for each archaic lexical item, and cross-check the items in this Dictionary of Americanisms. Who knows, maybe one or two lexical items will have relevant entries in the dictionary. But the OED has many entries of Americanisms in it, and those would have been checked for NOL.

Two sections of NOL deal with a limited amount of syntax. That is quite different from what is in this dictionary. It is my experience that commenters don't think in terms of the syntax, which I think is the most important evidence of all, and supports the view of obsolete lexis. So why do I think it's the most important evidence? It's less contextual, found in all genres, trends are trackable over time, subconsciously produced, massively represented, quantifiable. You get the picture. So when we see that "but if" in the Book of Mormon seems to mean 'unless', and note that the OED gives a 1590s example as the last one, the fact that there are many late 1500s nonbiblical syntactic patterns and structures in the Book of Mormon supports the obsolete meaning.

Since the book of mormon was dictated, how would you eliminate the possibility that the EmodE found wasn't merely part of the spoken language of Joseph Smith's family and area? He supposedly wasn't well versed in writing and used scribes a lot, so he probably made many errors when he spoke that could be considered EmodE? Have you explored the possibility that EmodE was part of Joseph's spoken language at the time? If you did, how did you eliminate this possibility?

[clarkgoble]

1 hour ago, champatsch said:

For example, hinderment is quoted in an early 1800s book as occurring in an early 1600s text, but it turned out to be an incorrect reading of hindrance (because of a very difficult old secretary hand). It took many hours of work and many volunteers in Scotland to determine that.

Fascinating. Thanks for clearing that up.

Hope you chime in on the oral vs. written discussion and whether you used any corpuses that included court transcripts like ARCHER. 

 

[champatsch]

I haven't looked at ARCHER, but that would be good to look at, and things like it.  I have used the Gale databases to look at 19c newspapers. Of course I have looked at Joseph's personal letters and his 1832 history. The corpus, unfortunately, isn't large, especially if we confine it to the early 1830s and before.

In the case of syntax, dialects did change at different rates depending on the feature, but in many domains pan-dialectal shifts occurred, such as with verb complementation patterns or verb inflection or past-tense expression or modal shall usage. Take the non-emphatic, periphrastic past with did, there's a paper on a Newfoundland dialect that was conservative in this regard but it ultimately didn't maintain it into the 19c.

The Book of Mormon was dictated. If Joseph was the author, then it's an oral text. If he wasn't the author, then it isn't necessarily an oral text. There are no contractions in the original manuscript. That fits with written or very careful oral. There are many complicated sentences and there is a lot of high level language. That fits better with written than oral. (Of course there are plenty of short, simple sentences that could be oral, . . . or written.) For example, complex finite verb complementation (more than 100 cases in the Book of Mormon) is not simple or illiterate language. Modal shall usage, which is prevalent in the Book of Mormon, is something that can be found in more formal registers in the 19c, such as legal language.

Edited October 3, 2018 by champatsch

[Physics Guy]

Oral where you're making up a long story is different from casual conversation. When you're composing a narrative that has to hang together, I think you want to do everything possible to slow down the rate at which you have to commit yourself to new information, so you'd say everything in as lengthy a way as possible. You'd probably want to avoid sentences that were complicated in a way that was hard to keep track of yourself, but I think you'd resort frequently to complications that simply added canned verbal subroutines, because they would give you time to think. When I'm lecturing in German, I think I often produce even longer sentences than a German would, because I insert a familiar subroutine or two while working up the nerve to tie it off with a gewesen. I don't use many contractions, that's for sure.

Anyway, while you're here, Dr. Carmack, I'd really appreciate it if you could say something about just how conclusive you feel your evidence is against Joseph Smith's authorship, in light of the questions about hypercorrection, productive errors, and archaic oral dialects. There are people on this very board who seem to claim, on the strength of your work, that 19th century authorship of the Book of Mormon has been ruled out definitively. Would you really go that far?

I ask because if you would, then I don't understand why you haven't published this ruling-out in a mainstream journal, because it would be quite the sensation just as a discovery in literary history. If you wouldn't go that far, then I don't understand why Mormon apologists are seizing on your work so gladly.

[clarkgoble]

2 hours ago, champatsch said:

I haven't looked at ARCHER, but that would be good to look at, and things like it.  I have used the Gale databases to look at 19c newspapers. Of course I have looked at Joseph's personal letters and his 1832 history. The corpus, unfortunately, isn't large, especially if we confine it to the early 1830s and before.

I think court records could really finalize the thesis. That oral/written distinction seems the only real hole. (Although as I mentioned the problem of local dialects might remain - but a sufficiently large court transcript analysis would certainly make it less plausible if it tests out)

2 hours ago, champatsch said:

In the case of syntax, dialects did change at different rates depending on the feature, but in many domains pan-dialectal shifts occurred, such as with verb complementation patterns or verb inflection or past-tense expression or modal shall usage. Take the non-emphatic, periphrastic past with did, there's a paper on a Newfoundland dialect that was conservative in this regard but it ultimately didn't maintain it into the 19c.

As a tangent, I know back when I'd talked with Royal years ago (I'm sure he doesn't remember me) he had that interesting thesis about how languages evolve. The work I'd read by him on it was more oriented toward phoneme evolution through mistakes due to intersection with other dialects or languages. I wonder if you and he ever discussed grammatical evolution along those lines.

2 hours ago, champatsch said:

The Book of Mormon was dictated. If Joseph was the author, then it's an oral text. If he wasn't the author, then it isn't necessarily an oral text.

I'd probably add a caveat here. I think if one assumes an oral fraud model or subconscious ghost writing ala Taves then that's right. However the more plausible fraud model typically has him composing the text in advance and hiding pages in the hat. There are of course problems with that model. But I raise it to note orality isn't the only thesis.

[Exiled]

 

7 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

I don't understand why Mormon apologists are seizing on your work so gladly.

You obviously aren't mormon or have served a mission where opposition ridicules over the lack of evidence. Seizing on this and raising it to higher levels than warranted is understandable given the frustration some must feel.

Edited October 4, 2018 by Exiled

[champatsch]

17 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

Anyway, while you're here, Dr. Carmack, I'd really appreciate it if you could say something about just how conclusive you feel your evidence is against Joseph Smith's authorship, in light of the questions about hypercorrection, productive errors, and archaic oral dialects. There are people on this very board who seem to claim, on the strength of your work, that 19th century authorship of the Book of Mormon has been ruled out definitively. Would you really go that far?

I ask because if you would, then I don't understand why you haven't published this ruling-out in a mainstream journal, because it would be quite the sensation just as a discovery in literary history. If you wouldn't go that far, then I don't understand why Mormon apologists are seizing on your work so gladly.

I think you're right that it is worth having some of the comparative, descriptive linguistic data published in a mainstream journal. I've looked at one that seems like it would be a good fit. Of course implications would not be discussed.

Frankly, one potential problem I see is that prior writings discuss implications and those could be found and be decisive in an adverse review determination. Consequently, anything further I say about syntactic data in relation to 19c authorship would just add to the current corpus of relevant statements.