Skousen & Carmack Lecture Take Aways

[Physics Guy]

20 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

Part of the issue though is that while there were religious texts given by purported revelation - fraud few really aped KJV English that much. So what texts do you think he should check? Or are you just saying it's an untestable hypothesis?

I think the hypothesis that fake archaism could not have produced the Book of Mormon is probably untestable. If we had found lots of Early Modern syntax in known pseudo-Biblical texts, the apologetic argument could still have been made that Joseph Smith could not have achieved that degree of archaism because he was too uneducated and the Book of Mormon was produced too quickly. As it is we have the skeptical argument that Joseph Smith was too uneducated, and worked too quickly, to avoid the excessive archaism. To make a firm case either way would need a much more directly comparable sample. How many Bible-ish-sounding texts were dictated on the fly in early 19th century rural New England by uneducated writers who concealed their authorship?

Quote

I think that [persistent oral dialects not showing up in court transcripts is] less likely though. So it won't prove the thesis but it'll certainly give it a lot of strength.

I don't really know how likely it is that rustic language flew under the radar of court transcripts. If we're assessing the strength of this kind of thesis, however, we're dealing in degrees of unlikelihood like the unlikelihood of Smith having found an otherwise unknown Early Modern text—or receiving gold plates from an angel. In comparison to those long shot odds, the chance of rural rhetoric being lost to history does not seem so unlikely.

So once again it seems hard to test this issue sufficiently to establish that Joseph Smith could or could not have faked the Book of Mormon. If court transcripts show persistent archaism, apologists could still argue that Joseph Smith never actually heard any of that backwoods stuff, even though he could in principle have been exposed to it. They argue that way, after all, about maps of Arabia and the Book of Enoch. If court transcripts show no archaic dialect, skeptics will shrug and say that it was rarely ever spoken in court, and when it was, stenographers corrected it.

I still think it would be very interesting to learn what kind of English shows up in court transcripts from Joseph Smith's time and place. From a skeptical point of view, the Book of Mormon is an interesting linguistic oddity and it would be nice to know whether Smith produced it by speaking his own rural dialect or by concocting a Kunstsprache. From a Mormon point of view it must be interesting to know whether God preferred to reveal a new Scripture in the native language of his Prophet even though it was a backwoods patois, or whether instead God chose an older-than-the-King-James-Bible dialect in order to reveal something about Nephite culture. The evidence available might be strong enough to decide between the interesting alternatives within each major viewpoint (Mormonism and skepticism), even if it will never be strong enough to force a choice between the major viewpoints themselves.

[champatsch]

22 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

From a skeptical point of view, the Book of Mormon is an interesting linguistic oddity and it would be nice to know whether Smith produced it by speaking his own rural dialect or by concocting a Kunstsprache.

Good to get your comments. There are many broad aspects of Book of Mormon syntax that were not part of Joseph's dialect, so you're left with a concocted language where Joseph made dozens of hits with earlier obscure usage — both systematic and individual. Since I suspect that is a strongly preferred view, and possibly the only one you are willing to (publicly) entertain, then you are obliged by the circumstances of the case to have an extremely high tolerance for fortuitous non-biblical early modern coincidence in dozens of syntactic domains (two of which I've briefly mentioned here), and also in dozens of lexical usages (not mentioned here; but see NOL 2018). As a physicist, I think you can appreciate vanishingly low probabilities, which is how I see the matter, after studying the data for several years.

While it's not inaccurate to characterize the syntax and lexis as a linguistic oddity, for its time, it can surely be admired for its mastery of earlier forms, a glimpse of which I have given here. If we aggregate a dozen pseudo-biblical texts, we still don't reach the subtlety and mastery of archaism exhibited by the Book of Mormon. It is the little things which are quite telling, things like the following: sophisticated modal auxiliary usage in verb complementation or after subordinating conjunctions, which is archaic subjunctive usage; the rare "more part" variants that we don't see in later revivalist authors; or the conjoined structures that show a thorough understanding of the possibilities of earlier syntax. Etc.

From the skeptical POV, if we are going to be forthright about the matter, we must admit that Joseph Smith had a remarkable command of non-biblical Early Modern English (not older only than the King James Bible — both older and younger). The skeptic diminishing Joseph's accomplishment is akin to having one's cake and eating it too. The way I've usually seen it expressed is to stipulate that despite there being a remarkable level of correspondence with earlier forms and structures, it was done haphazardly and fortuitously, merely out of an attempt to be biblical. That Book of Mormon archaism is attested and clearly superior, syntactically and lexically, to pseudo-biblicism is conveniently ignored.

These pseudo-biblical texts have been declared by skeptics to be the yardstick by which to measure the Book of Mormon, since they were produced out of desire to be biblical. They possess both overlapping and idiosyncratic levels of biblical style. Of course from the skeptical POV, that is precisely what Joseph was attempting to do: be biblical, while inescapably mixing the pseudo-biblical language with his own dialect. The problem is that a biblical–dialectal mixture cannot account for the Book of Mormon's verbal system (present, past, future, perfect), its personal relative pronoun system, it verb complementation system, its pronominal system, etc. And so we have returned to your favored view, art-language, in which Joseph repeatedly and surprisingly eschewed his own subconscious linguistic preferences as well as biblical patterns.

[Exiled]

39 minutes ago, champatsch said:

Good to get your comments. There are many broad aspects of Book of Mormon syntax that were not part of Joseph's dialect, so you're left with a concocted language where Joseph made dozens of hits with earlier obscure usage — both systematic and individual. Since I suspect that is a strongly preferred view, and possibly the only one you are willing to (publicly) entertain, then you are obliged by the circumstances of the case to have an extremely high tolerance for fortuitous non-biblical early modern coincidence in dozens of syntactic domains (two of which I've briefly mentioned here), and also in dozens of lexical usages (not mentioned here; but see NOL 2018). As a physicist, I think you can appreciate vanishingly low probabilities, which is how I see the matter, after studying the data for several years.

While it's not inaccurate to characterize the syntax and lexis as a linguistic oddity, for its time, it can surely be admired for its mastery of earlier forms, a glimpse of which I have given here. If we aggregate a dozen pseudo-biblical texts, we still don't reach the subtlety and mastery of archaism exhibited by the Book of Mormon. It is the little things which are quite telling, things like the following: sophisticated modal auxiliary usage in verb complementation or after subordinating conjunctions, which is archaic subjunctive usage; the rare "more part" variants that we don't see in later revivalist authors; or the conjoined structures that show a thorough understanding of the possibilities of earlier syntax. Etc.

From the skeptical POV, if we are going to be forthright about the matter, we must admit that Joseph Smith had a remarkable command of non-biblical Early Modern English (not older only than the King James Bible — both older and younger). The skeptic diminishing Joseph's accomplishment is akin to having one's cake and eating it too. The way I've usually seen it expressed is to stipulate that despite there being a remarkable level of correspondence with earlier forms and structures, it was done haphazardly and fortuitously, merely out of an attempt to be biblical. That Book of Mormon archaism is attested and clearly superior, syntactically and lexically, to pseudo-biblicism is conveniently ignored.

These pseudo-biblical texts have been declared by skeptics to be the yardstick by which to measure the Book of Mormon, since they were produced out of desire to be biblical. They possess both overlapping and idiosyncratic levels of biblical style. Of course from the skeptical POV, that is precisely what Joseph was attempting to do: be biblical, while inescapably mixing the pseudo-biblical language with his own dialect. The problem is that a biblical–dialectal mixture cannot account for the Book of Mormon's verbal system (present, past, future, perfect), its personal relative pronoun system, it verb complementation system, its pronominal system, etc. And so we have returned to your favored view, art-language, in which Joseph repeatedly and surprisingly eschewed his own subconscious linguistic preferences as well as biblical patterns.

Isn't spoken language different than written?  Isn't it a possibility that Joseph Smith's spoken dialect was much closer to the EmodE you find than you are presuming?  We know he dictated and didn't write.  So, how would you eliminate the possibility of Joseph Smith's speech being closer to EmodE?  Clark proposes using trial transcripts, but even then one may clean up their EmodE "mistakes" when going before a serious tribunal.  Too bad there aren't recordings of how people spoke in that area back in the 1820's/1830's.  Then there is the phenomenon that certain families speak better than other families and perhaps Joseph Smith's family was more "backwoods/EmodE" than the rest of the population.  Also, how do you account for certain linguists that claim that certain appalachian populations or ozark populations, today, still have Elizabethian or EmodE as part of their dialect?   

Edited October 20, 2018 by Exiled

[champatsch]

1 hour ago, Exiled said:

Isn't spoken language different than written?  Isn't it a possibility that Joseph Smith's spoken dialect was much closer to the EmodE you find than you are presuming?  We know he dictated and didn't write.  So, how would you eliminate the possibility of Joseph Smith's speech being closer to EmodE?  Clark proposes using trial transcripts, but even then one may clean up their EmodE "mistakes" when going before a serious tribunal.  Too bad there aren't recordings of how people spoke in that area back in the 1820's/1830's.  Then there is the phenomenon that certain families speak better than other families and perhaps Joseph Smith's family was more "backwoods/EmodE" than the rest of the population.  Also, how do you account for certain linguists that claim that certain appalachian populations or ozark populations, today, still have Elizabethian or EmodE as part of their dialect?   

Well, what you need to discover is evidence that Joseph Smith's dialect really could have had a constellation of earlier features that are not attested into the future. Some features appear to have died out globally, some were maintained in one or more dialects (sometimes with restricted usage), some involve patterns that don't appear to have persisted in any early 19c dialect. Etc. Could his spoken dialect have maintained non-emphatic periphrastic did, non-3sg -th inflection, relatively heavy personal which, singular ye, robust object they, heavy finite verb complementation, complex finite verb complementation, relatively heavy subordinating that usage, robust modal auxiliary usage, heavy use of the conjunction save, noncontextual plural mights, etc.?

[Physics Guy]

Why not retain all those things, in spoken language, perhaps in registers not used in writing? My understanding is that spoken language in remote regions is well known to retain archaic features for long periods. So is there really a strong default presumption that, just because various syntactic structures were not being printed in Joseph Smith's day, therefore he cannot have known them?

Independently of the whole possibility that Smith actually knew Early Modern grammar, "heavy" use of archaic structures is exactly what hypercorrection is about. Nor are the two skeptical theories—hypercorrection and archaic dialect—mutually exclusive. On the contrary they are perfectly compatible. Smith might have over-used archaic constructions because he'd heard so many things like them that he didn't realize how out-of-date they were.

[champatsch]

19 minutes ago, Physics Guy said:

Independently of the whole possibility that Smith actually knew Early Modern grammar, "heavy" use of archaic structures is exactly what hypercorrection is about. Nor are the two skeptical theories—hypercorrection and archaic dialect—mutually exclusive. On the contrary they are perfectly compatible. Smith might have over-used archaic constructions because he'd heard so many things like them that he didn't realize how out-of-date they were.

Hypercorrection can cover some things, but you need to add creative, fortuitous analogy in many instances. So "cause it that it shall" syntax (3n2904) could have been produced on the analogy of other complex finite syntax, with fortuitous coincidence of the repeated it with earlier causative syntax (the modal shall in the complement isn't a biblical usage but persisted in formal language). Even "a more part" and "the more parts" would fall under the umbrella of fortuitous analogy, and probably "since that" and "to that". These were just mentioned and are a few examples out of many.

Edited October 20, 2018 by champatsch

[Physics Guy]

On 10/20/2018 at 5:52 PM, champatsch said:

Good to get your comments. There are many broad aspects of Book of Mormon syntax that were not part of Joseph's dialect, so you're left with a concocted language where Joseph made dozens of hits with earlier obscure usage — both systematic and individual. Since I suspect that is a strongly preferred view, and possibly the only one you are willing to (publicly) entertain, then you are obliged by the circumstances of the case to have an extremely high tolerance for fortuitous non-biblical early modern coincidence in dozens of syntactic domains (two of which I've briefly mentioned here), and also in dozens of lexical usages (not mentioned here; but see NOL 2018). As a physicist, I think you can appreciate vanishingly low probabilities, which is how I see the matter, after studying the data for several years.

Calling these archaic usages "hits" sounds like a sharpshooter fallacy. Nobody set the target for the Book of Mormon in advance, so there is no conclusion to be drawn just from the fact that some of its usage frequencies match an earlier era. It still has to be shown that these usages would somehow have been extremely unlikely for a 19th century writer like Smith. Showing that they would have been likely for an Early Modern writer is not the same as that.

Arguments about low probability are always difficult to sustain, because when you are already convinced about something, it's psychologically hard to notice the difference between alternatives that are 1-in-a-thousand unlikely and alternatives that are 1-in-a-billion unlikely. Either way one feels confident. In fact the chance that one has overlooked some correlation or something is considerably higher than 1-in-a-billion, however, and so no probability as low as 1-in-a-billion is ever really reliable. At the same time chances of 1-in-a-thousand happen every day in every big city, so the difference between 1-in-a-thousand and 1-in-a-billion is really very important. The case that one thinks is a billion-to-one favorite is probably really no more than thousand-to-one, and that's not enough.

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While it's not inaccurate to characterize the syntax and lexis as a linguistic oddity, for its time, it can surely be admired for its mastery of earlier forms, a glimpse of which I have given here. If we aggregate a dozen pseudo-biblical texts, we still don't reach the subtlety and mastery of archaism exhibited by the Book of Mormon. It is the little things which are quite telling, things like the following: sophisticated modal auxiliary usage in verb complementation or after subordinating conjunctions, which is archaic subjunctive usage; the rare "more part" variants that we don't see in later revivalist authors; or the conjoined structures that show a thorough understanding of the possibilities of earlier syntax. Etc.

"Mastery", "sophisticated" and "subtlety" are loaded terms. Even childish syntax is sophisticated and subtle, if you look at it carefully, because language is tricky in general. So an argument that seems to rely on the loadedness of subjective terms like "sophisticated" is suspicious to me. I'd be more impressed by even a single example that was clearly impossible for a later imitator to produce, than by any number of "patterns" of "creative complexity". Of course it's hard to even imagine a phrase that would literally be impossible for an imitator to produce. It's a lot easier to indicate a pattern of complexity—but I'm afraid that's my point here. Claims of "subtlety" are too easy to make to be really convincing.

And again on the pseudo--Biblical texts: these don't look like a good control group to me. A pseudo-Biblical text written by a professional writer will naturally have only superficial archaism, because it's supposed to give a Biblical impression but still read easily in the 19th century. If Joseph Smith didn't have that light a touch, that doesn't mean he wasn't a pseudo-Biblical writer. He might just not have been a good pseudo-Biblical writer.

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From the skeptical POV, if we are going to be forthright about the matter, we must admit that Joseph Smith had a remarkable command of non-biblical Early Modern English (not older only than the King James Bible — both older and younger). The skeptic diminishing Joseph's accomplishment is akin to having one's cake and eating it too. The way I've usually seen it expressed is to stipulate that despite there being a remarkable level of correspondence with earlier forms and structures, it was done haphazardly and fortuitously, merely out of an attempt to be biblical. That Book of Mormon archaism is attested and clearly superior, syntactically and lexically, to pseudo-biblicism is conveniently ignored.

These pseudo-biblical texts have been declared by skeptics to be the yardstick by which to measure the Book of Mormon, since they were produced out of desire to be biblical. They possess both overlapping and idiosyncratic levels of biblical style. Of course from the skeptical POV, that is precisely what Joseph was attempting to do: be biblical, while inescapably mixing the pseudo-biblical language with his own dialect. The problem is that a biblical–dialectal mixture cannot account for the Book of Mormon's verbal system (present, past, future, perfect), its personal relative pronoun system, it verb complementation system, its pronominal system, etc. And so we have returned to your favored view, art-language, in which Joseph repeatedly and surprisingly eschewed his own subconscious linguistic preferences as well as biblical patterns.

Perhaps some skeptics have naively thought of pseudo-Biblical writing as motivated by the same "desire to be biblical" that would have motivated Joseph Smith. If those skeptics did think that way, they were not thinking well. A normal writer wouldn't want to actually be Biblical. They might want to give an impression of Biblical flavor, but by no means would they want to turn off customers with too much obsolete grammar. They definitely wouldn't want to produce grammar even more archaic than King James English. They would make sure that hadn't happened, when they revised their first drafts.

Wouldn't they?

The Book of Mormon, on the other hand, was dictated by an uneducated man within a short span of time. He might perhaps somehow have used notes, but he probably did not have a full written draft. The dictated text might perhaps have been somewhat revised, but it probably wasn't thoroughly edited for grammar.

Skeptics presume that if the text which emerged had pre-KJB grammar then this happened by accident in the sense that it was unintentional, but that doesn't mean that it was haphazard and random. It would have been the systematic result of an uneducated author trying too hard to sound Biblical. And it would have been constrained by the instinctive patterns of human language, which certainly don't prevent people from deliberately speaking in unfamiliar ways, but which do (as far as I understand) make our utterances fall into systematic patterns of some kind.

The question is how much luck would be needed for the systematic errors in Joseph Smith's attempt at King James English to coincide with Early Modern syntax to the extent you have found. I don't think the answer is obvious. At any rate I'm sure the answer cannot be found simply by looking at how closely BofM syntax matches EModE, because that's only one side of the equation. The other side is the linguistics of fake archaism. Looking at known pseudo-Biblical texts does look to me like a good first step toward the linguistics of fake archaism, but it seems to me that it's a long way short of settling what kind of language could be expected from a writer like Joseph Smith, writing in his kind of circumstances, with his kind of purpose.

Edited October 21, 2018 by Physics Guy

[champatsch]

As for terms, and whether they're loaded, we have to use something, and I do so with specific usage in mind, some of which I've already laid out and mentioned. You know that I meant concrete things with the terms I used. I'm not the one who hasn't studied all the comparative linguistic data — so who is more likely to use terms accurately?

There's a lot of evidence to consider, and it would be helpful if you would study some of it. Why don't you study the modal shall usage of the text and argue against it showing mastery of earlier usage? If you're not interested, then I understand that — very few have the time, inclination, or background for it. You may just be interested in general ideological matters as an intellectual curiosity.

As far as the sharpshooter fallacy goes, it comes down to an irrelevancy. I had an MIT professor who knows a lot more about statistics than I do consider the matter for me a few years ago. I think I understood him correctly, and if so this is the point he made. If one says that there were 10 different varieties of English — or even 100 different varieties — that Joseph Smith might have used in producing the text, then the multiplication of that number and a extremely low probability value (that Joseph had the implicit knowledge to produce the Book of Mormon's extra-biblical, archaic syntax, which is a multiplication of dozens of low probabilities) is negligible. (From the skeptical perspective, Joseph's dialect and his intimate knowledge of biblical language enabled him to successfully make dozens of analogical hits with much earlier, non-biblical usage. Based on an examination of a large amount of comparative, descriptive linguistic evidence, I've estimated that to be an extremely low probability position.)

And consider that no one expected to find very much extra-biblical, archaic syntax in the Book of Mormon. That's not the point anyone began with. It only became clear after a critical text was formulated and after emerging digital databases were consulted. I, like many others, thought the dictation would be pseudo-biblical in formation. So the extra-biblical, archaic syntax wasn't anything that was sought at the outset. Royal Skousen noticed some possible correspondences in the OED, I did too, and that led to further searching in that database, and then to searching in much larger, recently constructed databases.

[Physics Guy]

If you only use "subtle" and "mastery" because you need some short labels for your precisely defined technical features, why not construct some less loaded terms and use them instead? At least for people like me, it would make your case come across as stronger. When I see grandiose vernacular terms appearing in technical arguments, I automatically suspect overselling.  For an example from my own field, look up "quantum teleportation".

The nature of my criticism doesn't seem to be getting across, though. My concern would not be addressed at all by even a hundred papers proving that the Book of Mormon was written in the most fluent Early Modern English, because my point is that all this could ever confirm would be that an Early Modern English speaker could have written the Book of Mormon. That simply doesn't say anything about whether or not the Book of Mormon could also have been written by a 19th century imitator.

My guess is that if an uneducated person tries to imitate an archaic dialect, they'll be quite likely to overdo it in a way that looks like a darn good match to a somewhat older dialect than their target one—every bit as good a match, in fact, as what you've found with Early Modern English and the Book of Mormon. Beyond the assumption that such a good match would surely take too much "mastery" of the archaic dialect, what evidence do you have that my guess isn't right?

The pseudo-Biblical works you've looked at so far do not count for this because their educated authors had both will and means to avoid excess archaism. If you do have good evidence against overdone amateur archaism resembling an earlier natural dialect, it doesn't seem to be getting the prominence it deserves in discussions like this, because it's a crucial issue.

Edited October 21, 2018 by Physics Guy

[clarkgoble]

On 10/19/2018 at 9:01 AM, Physics Guy said:

If I just think about expressions like "more part" that are sparse in the KJB but more common in the BofM, then I'm afraid that sounds consistent to me with overdone fake archaism: an imitator seizes on a turn of phrase that sounds nicely Biblical and overuses it, like a hammy actor who plays a French character by saying, "Oh la la!" all the time. If there are also a couple of instances where the archaic phrase doesn't even appear in the KJB at all, then I have to think whether these phrases are ones that a 19th century imitator might have produced by overgeneralization.

But aren't those precisely the cases that looking at other pseudo-Elizabethan texts ought deal with? It seems to me you're trying to have it both ways. That these linguistic features are common for aping KJV like language yet simultaneously don't show up in such works. Now I do think that Stanford needs a larger corpus of quasi-KJV texts for his conclusions to be persuasive. But it seems to me you're setting the bar such that it's not even in theory possible. 

On 10/19/2018 at 9:01 AM, Physics Guy said:

To make a firm case either way would need a much more directly comparable sample. How many Bible-ish-sounding texts were dictated on the fly in early 19th century rural New England by uneducated writers who concealed their authorship?

I think the more likely case would be that English speakers of a particular era and culture are apt to ape KJV is fairly consistent ways. If I'm following your reasoning correctly what you're arguing is that local dialect, particularly among the uneducated, would produce very different types of pseudo-KJV texts. In theory that ought be detectable. Again though it'd depend upon finding a larger corpus of pseudo-KJV texts and looking at the background of the authors to track grammatical elements.

My own guess would be that pseudo-KJV speaking in a religious context was fairly common, and fairly homogenized precisely because of tent revivals and the like. There may also be underlying cognitive structures that incentivize certain forms when aping KJV language. (As I recall it's these cognitive processes that Taves appeals to with various spiritual phenomena such as glossalia or the like that she thinks is likely behind the Book of Mormon)

This isn't my field so I'm somewhat limited. Beyond the court transcripts which I think will at least provide grammatical structures in common use I think there are some preaching corpuses. The CONCE corpus is primarily from letters, although people do drop into pseudo-KJV speaking in letters. Arguably such would be far more likely to parallel Joseph Smith given the textuality of the Book of Mormon as oppose to being purely oral. Some might dispute that given the place of scribes. However if the text is fraudulent (as opposed to spirit written as with Taves' model) I'd expect that to parallel more closely than oral revival pseudo-KJV. Admittedly in saying that I'm dismissing Taves a fair bit. I am just very skeptical Joseph could have unconsciously produced the text unaware through spirit writing given the consistency in distances, locations, events and the so forth. At minimum I think a map and an outline would be necessary which would undermine Taves' thesis IMO. However once you have pre-written sheets he's dictating then you have a situation more akin to pseudo-KJV writing more akin to what we find in religious letters.

I believe Stanford has already checked his grammatical structures in CONCE though. There are various transcripts of sermons from the Second Great Awakening such as Jedediah Burchard's and others. I don't know if anyone has compiled these into a general corpus. If those aren't already in any of the main corpuses then it might make a good project for some grad student in linguistics at BYU. At a minimum it'd be useful for all sorts of questions regarding the Great Awakening.

On 10/19/2018 at 9:01 AM, Physics Guy said:

I don't really know how likely it is that rustic language flew under the radar of court transcripts. If we're assessing the strength of this kind of thesis, however, we're dealing in degrees of unlikelihood like the unlikelihood of Smith having found an otherwise unknown Early Modern text—or receiving gold plates from an angel. In comparison to those long shot odds, the chance of rural rhetoric being lost to history does not seem so unlikely.

I think it'd be unlikely that the dialect would shift significantly during testimony. One can argue that the transcripts aren't accurate to minute phrasing which seems a more likely problem.

Again though I think that we're looking at this inductively. We can't guarantee there won't be any problems. The more of these types of objections can be met it makes the thesis that much more likely to be correct even if never fully proven. Given that the thesis is largely orthogonal to the issue of fraud/miracle I'm not sure that's not still significant. Certainly it's not going to work apologetically to prove the Book of Mormon miraculous. But I do find it quite interesting. As you say, even if it turns out the language is found in the court transcripts or in religious sermon transcripts that would dissuade apologists. Likewise if it isn't it won't turn you or someone like Dan Vogel into a believer. I do think it'll shift how we look at the origins though. I think at minimum it's an interesting question how it'll affect Taves' thesis for instance.

 

Edited October 22, 2018 by clarkgoble

[Physics Guy]

15 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

But aren't those precisely the cases that looking at other pseudo-Elizabethan texts ought deal with? It seems to me you're trying to have it both ways. That these linguistic features are common for aping KJV like language yet simultaneously don't show up in such works. Now I do think that Stanford needs a larger corpus of quasi-KJV texts for his conclusions to be persuasive. But it seems to me you're setting the bar such that it's not even in theory possible. 

I am indeed precisely trying to have it both ways, because there are (at least) two different ways to be had. Not all texts that sound kind of King-James-ish are instantiations of the same Platonic form of "trying to be biblical". Not all apings of KJV language are the same species of ape. Why should they be?

On the one hand an educated professional writer might compose a humorous text with the goal of selling books to the rather bookish market segment of people who will pay for such things. This writer has the clear intention of sounding kind of Biblical but still being easy to read for her contemporary public. She wants to keep her grammar respectable, and she knows the grammar that is considered respectable in her own time well enough to do that. She composes her piece by revising multiple written drafts, as she always does. If there were any weird archaic usages in her first draft, they don't survive into the published version.

On the other hand an uneducated farmhand who has never written a book, and whose own grammar is rural old-fashioned, is dictating off the top of his head a text which he is going to pass off as being miraculously revealed to him by God. He's not trying to amuse a bookish audience. He's trying to stage a religious con, and he knows (at least instinctively) that the bulk of his marks will be people who are kind of expecting any decent scripture to sound funny to them. So he's not educated enough to realize that you can overdo archaism, he doesn't know respectable grammar very well, he doesn't take time to revise his text to correct grammar or tone down the archaism ... and he's shrewd enough to guess that his purposes don't require any of those things. His imitation of KJB language is going to come out very differently from the first writer's.

Quote

My own guess would be that pseudo-KJV speaking in a religious context was fairly common, and fairly homogenized precisely because of tent revivals and the like. 

This is a good point; I think you might well be right, and that it would be interesting to look at tent sermons from Smith's time, if any were preserved in the form in which they were delivered. I would guess, however, that the pseudo-Biblical English of a revivalist preacher is likely to be a third kind of fake archaism, distinct from both the professionally written humor piece and the farmhand's hoax.

There is just no reason to assume that everything which sounds kind of Biblical must be an example of the same linguistic phenomenon. In fact it seems to me that as soon as one thinks about the matter a bit, it becomes obvious that there must be a lot of different possible kinds of pseudo-Biblical writing, and they are likely to differ greatly at the level of grammatical detail that Carmack is considering. There may possibly also be some common patterns among all forms of pseudo-Biblical language, but if so, it will take a lot of linguistic work to establish them.

Yes, this means that the bar is very high for establishing that somebody like Joseph Smith could not have composed something like the Book of Mormon. Sufficient evidence probably does not exist to confirm or disprove the hypothesis. To me this stalemate is the expected default. Carmack's and Skousen's analysis of the Book of Mormon language has been interesting, but the claim that it disproves Joseph Smith's authorship always struck me as highly implausible, because no matter how consistent the language might be with an earlier era, showing that the language was inconsistent with 19th century imitation was obviously going to be very difficult.

Edited October 23, 2018 by Physics Guy

[champatsch]

If you wish to make these strong assertions, PG, I would hope that you would respect the subject matter enough to study it first. Perhaps my pointing this out may motivate you to study the matter in the near future. But at the moment, it is clear that a lack of subject matter knowledge hasn't kept you from making strong assertions.

The hypothesis is that early modern competence informs the text. This hypothesis economically explains a diverse array of independent
pieces of evidence. Thus the probability that it is correct is considerable.

Now, PG doesn't really know the subject matter or take the time to know it. He doesn't know the scores of non-biblical attested archaisms found in the earliest text of the Book of Mormon. And he tends to disregard supporting evidence, focusing in on things piecemeal, in isolation. He is quick to dismiss "more part" evidence, for example, suggesting that it is overdone archaism. This is done by conveniently ignoring that it is supported by dozens of other such things. Because of the support, it must be taken seriously, it must not be treated as pseudo-archaism. He doesn't know various usage patterns either, or that some things cannot be characterized as overdone archaism.

I have found that there are hardly any non-biblical attested archaisms in pseudo-biblical texts. I have referred to some of these things from time to time. That strengthens the hypothesis, no matter what distinctions might be placed on the nature of the Book of Mormon's pseudo-biblicality. And if PG will look at some independent literature, he will see that the view among scholars is, quite uniformly, that the Book of Mormon is a species of pseudo-biblical text (see, for example, a 2010 article by Eran Shalev, or a 2016 dissertation by Gregory Bowen).

Overdone archaism is not a simple thing to determine, and could be a loaded term. What is the measure? As I think about it, it strikes me as quite susceptible to bias. Some examples.

If a text uses some some non-biblical (morpho)syntax at a higher rate than the Book of Mormon does, and the usage rate appears to be (close to) record-setting, should we classify Book of Mormon usage as overdone archaism? [e.g. "had (been) spake" usage]

If some non-biblical attested archaism occurs only 10 times in non-biblical portions of the Book of Mormon (about 250,000 words), but this may be a record-setting amount for a single text, can it qualify as overdone archaism? [e.g. "of which hath been spoken" language]

If some record-setting, non-biblical attested archaism occurs in only five percent of possible cases in the Book of Mormon, does it qualify as overdone archaism? [e.g. complex finite complementation after the verb cause]

More interesting and important than labeling some non-biblical attested archaism as overdone is noting that it's there in the first place, and that there are many other such archaisms. It is statistically significant that there are scores of non-biblical attested archaisms in the Book of Mormon, instead of just a few, which could be ascribed to chance analogy. This is something that the fair-minded will not overlook.

[Physics Guy]

57 minutes ago, champatsch said:

The hypothesis is that early modern competence informs the text. This hypothesis economically explains a diverse array of independent pieces of evidence. Thus the probability that it is correct is considerable.

For a hypothesis to explain a lot of evidence economically is certainly a point in its favor. By no means, however, does it establish a high probability that the hypothesis is correct, if there exists an incompatible alternative hypothesis which could also explain the evidence economically. Even if the alternative hypothesis is just a speculative possibility, one cannot claim to rule it out with high probability just because the first hypothesis seems to fit the data well. You do not have a conclusive case until you close the loopholes. That's tough, but that's the rule. You may have done a mountain of work, but as long as there is a serious outstanding alternative that you have not ruled out, you cannot go around claiming to have established your hypothesis as highly probable.

Complaining that I haven't read all your papers is a dodge at this point. I am perfectly willing to accept all you say about how Early Modern competence would explain the Book of Mormon language; I have never challenged that. I have asked whether you have also ruled out the alternative explanation, of overdone archaism by an uneducated writer who lacked time, ability, and motivation to refine his grammar. I have read your one paper about pseudo-Biblical texts, and pointed out that they are not a close comparison group for the Book of Mormon because of the very different way in which they were produced. I think that's a fair and substantial criticism of that paper. You may be able to address it, but you can hardly say that I'm just making strong assertions without reading anything. I read your paper and made a serious criticism. Enthusiastic acceptance is not the only form of engagement.

Quote

It is statistically significant that there are scores of non-biblical attested archaisms in the Book of Mormon, instead of just a few, which could be ascribed to chance analogy. 

Who says it's a chance analogy? Overgeneralization is a systematic error that people unfamiliar with their target dialect make consistently.

Otherwise, I quite agree that the hypothesis of overdone archaism is not easy to determine and test. And so if I were trying to prove to Mormons that the Book of Mormon was full of overdone fake archaism, I would have a steep hill to climb. Evidence and arguments that might win me ringing endorsements from non-Mormons would get me nowhere with the Mormons, and their skepticism would be legitimate. Most of the evidence that I might be able to find would be subject to interpretation, and from their point of view it would surely look weak.

I think you have the same uphill fight, for the same reasons, if you want to rule out overdone archaism clearly enough to make a case for non-Mormons. Until you do that, though, all you have is a hypothesis that may be consistent with the data, not a linguistic proof that Joseph Smith could not have written the Book of Mormon.

Edited October 23, 2018 by Physics Guy

[clarkgoble]

I think it's correct that we need more pseudo-KJV texts to eliminate the idea that these grammatical structures pop up. However if we do check these, particularly oral transcripts in court records and transcripts of sermons in the Second Great Awakening then I do think that's pretty compelling. It might also be worth looking at more modern "spirit speaking" to test Taves' thesis that ties things to a manifestation of lower level cognitive processes. While language has changed, it hasn't change that much, so one would expect the biases of how pseudo-KJV is produced would still tell us what structures are privileged.

[Rajah Manchou]

14 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

It might also be worth looking at more modern "spirit speaking" to test Taves' thesis that ties things to a manifestation of lower level cognitive processes. 

Somewhat off topic, but I found this interesting article the other day likely written by Jane Leade's son-in-law. It's a very 'Tavesian' spin on terrestrial vs. celestial gold:

A Conference betwixt Philochrysus and Philadelphus On the Philadelphian Gold

"There are also Celestial Bodies (of a spiritual and heavenly property) and Bodies Terrestrial (of a material and earthly property as common gold but the Glory of the Celestial is one, and the glory of the Terrestrial is another; that is, the glory of the Philadelphian Gold differs from the glory of the Peruvian, as far as heaven is from Earth."

I can see how someone familiar with the writings of the Philadelphians and 17th century theosophists could have looked at a heap of hammered tin and perceived them to be an ancient golden record.

[clarkgoble]

15 minutes ago, Rajah Manchou said:

Somewhat off topic, but I found this interesting article the other day likely written by Jane Leade's son-in-law. It's a very 'Tavesian' spin on terrestrial vs. celestial gold:

A Conference betwixt Philochrysus and Philadelphus On the Philadelphian Gold
 

Steve Fleming has done a lot on the influences of this group on Joseph Smith. He particularly see big parallels with Jane Lead. I'll confess I'm a bit more skeptical but just haven't had the time to do as much research and careful analysis here as I'd like. Steve's thesis advisor was Taves so he's fairly sympathetic to her position.

Getting back to the topic of Stanford's work, it might be interesting to look for the grammatical structures of the Book of Mormon in Lead's work. While it's still fairly speculative about the Philadelphian influence on Joseph, it does come from the right era - the late 17th century. Many if not most of the texts are available online to test the grammatical structures.

 

Edited October 23, 2018 by clarkgoble

[JarMan]

On 10/8/2018 at 8:00 AM, champatsch said:

I'll pass this one on as well, although Royal may have considered it and not included it in the NOL write up because it isn't murmuring with God, it is murmuring with God's dealings with men. The with could mean 'about' or something else. Nonetheless, it is of some interest at least, since it shows a tendency to use the preposition with after the verb murmur.

John Goodrick, A sermon preached before the Honble Society of Lincolns-Inne, upon the 26th of July, 1685 being the thanksgiving-day for His Majesty's victory over the rebels, page 3
Wherefore it is our Duty, not to repine and murmur with God’s dealings with Men in this caſe, but to lay our hands upon our mouths, to be ſtill and quiet under his Diſpenſations.

Has Skousen considered "murmured with" in his analysis. This occurs twice in the Coverdale Bible. 2 Chronicles 16:10 -- "And Osias was wroth, and had a censoure in his hande. But Asa was wroth at ye Seer, and put him in preson: for he murmured with him ouer this thinge." 2 Chronicles 26:19 -- "And whyle he murmured with the prestes, the leprosy spronge out of his foreheade in the presence of the prestes in the house of the LORDE before the altare of incense." There is at least one other example on EEBO, as well.

[JarMan]

@champatsch Have you done an analysis of "visit your destruction" in Helaman 13:10? Skousen lists this phrase as one that doesn't occur in EModE. A Latin to English translation (as I propose) offers a possible explanation for this. The Latin word visent means "(they) will/shall visit", but it also means "(they) will/shall see". I propose the original Latin text used visent to mean "(they) shall see" (which in the context of the verse makes perfect sense) but the translator unconventionally rendered it "(they) shall visit". Perhaps the translator had the end in mind where the Lamanites bring about the total defeat of the Nephites.

[champatsch]

6 hours ago, JarMan said:

@champatsch Have you done an analysis of "visit your destruction" in Helaman 13:10? Skousen lists this phrase as one that doesn't occur in EModE. A Latin to English translation (as I propose) offers a possible explanation for this. The Latin word visent means "(they) will/shall visit", but it also means "(they) will/shall see". I propose the original Latin text used visent to mean "(they) shall see" (which in the context of the verse makes perfect sense) but the translator unconventionally rendered it "(they) shall visit". Perhaps the translator had the end in mind where the Lamanites bring about the total defeat of the Nephites.

I'll get back to you in a few weeks. I have limited internet right now.

[Ryan Dahle]

10 hours ago, JarMan said:

@champatsch Have you done an analysis of "visit your destruction" in Helaman 13:10? Skousen lists this phrase as one that doesn't occur in EModE. A Latin to English translation (as I propose) offers a possible explanation for this. The Latin word visent means "(they) will/shall visit", but it also means "(they) will/shall see". I propose the original Latin text used visent to mean "(they) shall see" (which in the context of the verse makes perfect sense) but the translator unconventionally rendered it "(they) shall visit". Perhaps the translator had the end in mind where the Lamanites bring about the total defeat of the Nephites.

A number of passages in the Bible are actually quite similar to Helaman 13:10:

Hosea 8:13

13 They sacrifice flesh for the sacrifices of mine offerings, and eat it; but the Lord ^aaccepteth them not; now will he ^bremember their iniquity, and visit their sins: they shall return to ^cEgypt.

Jeremiah 14:10

10 ¶ Thus saith the Lord unto this people, Thus have they loved to wander, they have not ^arefrained their feet, therefore the Lord doth not accept them; he will now remember their ^biniquity, and visit their sins.

Lamentations 4:22

22 ¶ The punishment of thine iniquity is accomplished, O daughter of Zion; he will no more carry thee away into captivity: he will visit thine iniquity, O daughter of Edom; he will discover thy sins.

Hosea 8:13

13 They sacrifice flesh for the sacrifices of mine offerings, and eat it; but the Lord ^aaccepteth them not; now will he ^bremember their iniquity, and visit their sins: they shall return to ^cEgypt.

Hosea 9:9

9 They have deeply ^acorrupted themselves, as in the days of ^bGibeah: therefore he will remember their iniquity, he will visit their sins.

"Sins" and "iniquity" obviously aren't "destruction," but the oddity of the phrases seems to be the lack of additional clarification through a prepositional phrase. They each have "visit" followed by a possessive pronoun and then the unusual use of "sins/iniquity" as a direct object, just like "destruction" is used as a DO in Helaman 13:10, without any further qualification. I suspect the usage in Helaman 13:10 is just a shortcut way of saying "visit your destruction" upon you or upon your heads. At least, that seems to be what the biblical passages are all saying in regard to sin and iniquity. 

 

Edited October 26, 2018 by Ryan Dahle

[JarMan]

10 hours ago, Ryan Dahle said:

A number of passages in the Bible are actually quite similar to Helaman 13:10:

Hosea 8:13

13 They sacrifice flesh for the sacrifices of mine offerings, and eat it; but the Lord ^aaccepteth them not; now will he ^bremember their iniquity, and visit their sins: they shall return to ^cEgypt.

Jeremiah 14:10

10 ¶ Thus saith the Lord unto this people, Thus have they loved to wander, they have not ^arefrained their feet, therefore the Lord doth not accept them; he will now remember their ^biniquity, and visit their sins.

Lamentations 4:22

22 ¶ The punishment of thine iniquity is accomplished, O daughter of Zion; he will no more carry thee away into captivity: he will visit thine iniquity, O daughter of Edom; he will discover thy sins.

Hosea 8:13

13 They sacrifice flesh for the sacrifices of mine offerings, and eat it; but the Lord ^aaccepteth them not; now will he ^bremember their iniquity, and visit their sins: they shall return to ^cEgypt.

Hosea 9:9

9 They have deeply ^acorrupted themselves, as in the days of ^bGibeah: therefore he will remember their iniquity, he will visit their sins.

"Sins" and "iniquity" obviously aren't "destruction," but the oddity of the phrases seems to be the lack of additional clarification through a prepositional phrase. They each have "visit" followed by a possessive pronoun and then the unusual use of "sins/iniquity" as a direct object, just like "destruction" is used as a DO in Helaman 13:10, without any further qualification. I suspect the usage in Helaman 13:10 is just a shortcut way of saying "visit your destruction" upon you or upon your heads. At least, that seems to be what the biblical passages are all saying in regard to sin and iniquity. 

 

In these passages I take visit to mean "punish on account of." I should also note that the one doing the visiting is always God.

Helaman 13:10 is different on both accounts. It wouldn't make sense to say "punish you on account of your destruction." Also, God is not the subject of the sentence. It's the enemies of the Nephites doing the visiting. So I think Skousen is correct to identify this as being unique. I went through dozens of instances of "visit _______" in EEBO as well as all of the ones I could find in the KJB and the Book of Mormon and I haven't found any reason to think Skousen has missed something.

There are two ways I can think of to read "visit your destruction." It could mean "cause your destruction" or it could mean "see (or observe) your destruction." "Cause your destruction" makes sense to us because we know the eventual outcome: the Lamanites completely destroy the Nephites. But I don't think this was Samuel the Lamanite's message. He wasn't saying repent or your enemies (who happen to be my descendants) are going to utterly destroy your descendants. He was saying repent or the Lord will destroy your descendants. And this destruction will be witnessed by the fourth generation of your enemies. This mention of the fourth generation is a biblical allusion as we see from several passages such as Exodus 20:5 and Numbers 14:18 (just to name two): "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation." At any rate, God is always doing the visiting in the Bible and in the other EEBO passages I looked at when visiting means something bad.

Reading this passage to mean "see (or observe) your destruction" makes the most sense. We have a parallel phrase earlier in the verse: "there shall be those of the fourth generation who shall live, of your enemies, to behold your utter destruction". The problem is that visit does not mean "see" in English and I couldn't find any early modern or modern examples where it did. However, the Latin verb viso (from which we get the words visit and vision) means both "visit" and "see." My hypothesis is that this Latin word was mis-translated as "visit" when it should have been "see" and that this mistake was influenced by the translator's knowledge that the Nephites would eventually be destroyed by their enemies (as opposed to being destroyed by an apocalyptic act of God, for example).

[Physics Guy]

On 10/23/2018 at 6:43 PM, clarkgoble said:

I think it's correct that we need more pseudo-KJV texts to eliminate the idea that these grammatical structures pop up. However if we do check these, particularly oral transcripts in court records and transcripts of sermons in the Second Great Awakening then I do think that's pretty compelling. It might also be worth looking at more modern "spirit speaking" to test Taves' thesis that ties things to a manifestation of lower level cognitive processes. While language has changed, it hasn't change that much, so one would expect the biases of how pseudo-KJV is produced would still tell us what structures are privileged.

I agree that these are things worth investigating and that they would help develop the linguistics of fake archaism. I am nowhere near so optimistic, however, that either court records or sermon transcripts will provide compelling evidence about what kind of language might be likely to occur if somebody like Joseph Smith tried to compose something like the Book of Mormon. They ought to provide some evidence, but I don't see how it could possibly be compelling.

It's very unlikely a priori for Smith to have found an otherwise unknown Early Modern text to copy, let alone for him to have been a prophet to whom God revealed a scripture with archaic grammar. So to rule out alternative hypotheses strongly enough to make even the found-text scenario probable, we would have to rule out even some pretty unusual cases—like the possibility that Joseph Smith's particular style of imitating old language was somehow unusual. Even if we managed to get enough old sermon transcripts to sketch out a typical pattern for tent-pulpit Bible-ese, it would take an awful lot of sermons, from many different preachers, before we could be confident of the tails of the distribution of imitation grammars.

And even if we somehow nailed down sermon grammar, Smith was not preaching a sermon. How much difference would that have made? Hard to say.

If it seems as though I am threatening to raise an infinite series of hair-splitting loopholes, all I can say is that loopholes like these probably won't seem far-fetched at all to very many non-Mormons. They're going to seem like obvious possibilities that are at least as likely as Smith having copied an unknown older text and a good deal more likely than the faithful Mormon scenario.

[clarkgoble]

7 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

It's very unlikely a priori for Smith to have found an otherwise unknown Early Modern text to copy, let alone for him to have been a prophet to whom God revealed a scripture with archaic grammar. So to rule out alternative hypotheses strongly enough to make even the found-text scenario probable, we would have to rule out even some pretty unusual cases—like the possibility that Joseph Smith's particular style of imitating old language was somehow unusual. Even if we managed to get enough old sermon transcripts to sketch out a typical pattern for tent-pulpit Bible-ese, it would take an awful lot of sermons, from many different preachers, before we could be confident of the tails of the distribution of imitation grammars.

It seems like this objection boils down to:

1. Joseph was the author
2. Therefore the language was natural from his environment

That is it just rejects the significance of the language since one already thinks him the author because it's unlikely he copied anything. To me I admit that seems like affirming the consequence. At minimum I think some unambiguous evidence Joseph was the author is necessary.

[Physics Guy]

No, I don't think that's my position. I'm just refusing to recognize a proof until all the loopholes are closed. I have never tried to prove to anyone that Smith wrote the Book of Mormon, but some Mormon apologists have taken to claiming that Carmack and Skousen have effectively proven that Smith could not have written the Book of Mormon. I'm disputing that claim of a proof, by pointing out significant loopholes.

By "prove" here I don't mean really demonstrate with perfect certainty, but only "establish as highly probable". And likewise by "loophole" I don't mean "far-fetched hypothetical scenario that could in principle be possible" but only "scenario that seems at least as likely as the one in which Smith found and copied an otherwise unknown Early Modern English text". So I'm not just being pedantic. I'm making a simple and serious point about evidence.

You can't say you've established it as highly unlikely that Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon, if your argument rests on simply assuming that fake archaism could never produce EModE grammar. Likewise you can't claim to have compelling evidence from sermon transcripts if the implications you draw from that evidence rest on simply assuming that two quite different kinds of fake archaism would have to produce similar grammar. Assumptions like there are non-trivial premises which need to be demonstrated as highly probable, if you want to establish your conclusion with high confidence.

 

 

Edited October 29, 2018 by Physics Guy

[clarkgoble]

23 minutes ago, Physics Guy said:

No, I don't think that's my position. I'm just refusing to recognize a proof until all the loopholes are closed.

I think skepticism is fair until some of these other data is checked. I'd also say it's not highly unlikely Joseph wrote the text on the basis on EModE grammar yet. At this point it's highly suggestive though. I'm not sure I'd agree that all loopholes need closed. At best we just need sufficient evidence to believe they're unlikely. Otherwise we get into a "God of the gaps" type of argument.

Thanks for clarifying.