Brian Hales latest BOM presentation -- dictation vs loose translation

[cinepro]

Ah, seems like only yesterday we were discussing this.  Or 5,384 yesterdays.

While I'm fascinated by the 16th century flavor of the theory, I still need someone to explain something to me.

How do you get names of people and cities with anything other than a tight translation?

Take, for example, this (an example of a real unknown script):

If I told you this represented a name and asked you to translate it phonetically into the English alphabet using a loose translation, how would you do it?

Now, suppose you had access to a computer called the Great Onicular Decipherer Computer, and it could decipher unknown scripts and show you the phonetic translation on a screen (and then you read it off the screen to a secretary).  So the computer shows you the name as "Puntoalow", and you dictate "Puntoalow" to the secretary.  Again, how would such a thing be possible with a "loose" translation method?

Now, imagine a series of 400 pages of such characters, similarly unknown, for which you rely on the Great Onicular Decipherer Computer to tell you what the symbols mean.  Explain to me how a loose translation would work in this scenario.

 

Bonus question:  Suppose you had a friend, Olly, who was impressed by you being able use the Great Onicular Decipherer Computer to decipher the text, so he asks to try.  You let him, but when he looks into the viewfinder, he sees a message that says "First, you need to study the symbols to try to figure it out, then I'll help you."

How long do you think Olly would need to stare at the symbols before he could figure it out himself?  A week?  A year?  How long does someone need to look at an unknown script before it suddenly becomes intelligible?

Edited August 20, 2019 by cinepro

[clarkgoble]

The loose translation theory as I understand it works on multi-sentence units. The issue of names is a good one since those are smaller units but are tied to the larger unit if the larger unit of a phrase, sentence or so forth entail one particular noun (or choice of nouns).

More or less, if I'm following you correctly, you're trying to figure out the loose translation model by building it up word by word. But that's precisely what the loose translation or paraphrase model rejects.

[Glenn101]

3 hours ago, cinepro said:

Ah, seems like only yesterday we were discussing this.  Or 5,384 yesterdays.

While I'm fascinated by the 16th century flavor of the theory, I still need someone to explain something to me.

How do you get names of people and cities with anything other than a tight translation?

Take, for example, this (an example of a real unknown script):

If I told you this represented a name and asked you to translate it phonetically into the English alphabet using a loose translation, how would you do it?

Now, suppose you had access to a computer called the Great Onicular Decipherer Computer, and it could decipher unknown scripts and show you the phonetic translation on a screen (and then you read it off the screen to a secretary).  So the computer shows you the name as "Puntoalow", and you dictate "Puntoalow" to the secretary.  Again, how would such a thing be possible with a "loose" translation method?

Now, imagine a series of 400 pages of such characters, similarly unknown, for which you rely on the Great Onicular Decipherer Computer to tell you what the symbols mean.  Explain to me how a loose translation would work in this scenario.

 

This is one area where cinepro and I seem to agree. There are many words in the Book of Mormon that would almost surely have to be given just as a translator would see them and provide the English translation. I don't see how Zarahemla could have come from any type of expansion. All of the concerns about intertextuality are really moot.... unless God had nothing to do with the translation. If He did have something to do with the translation, the original source of all those intertextual alignments. By the gift and power of God covers a lot of territory and explains things that are otherwise so far unexplainable.

[cinepro]

16 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

The loose translation theory as I understand it works on multi-sentence units. The issue of names is a good one since those are smaller units but are tied to the larger unit if the larger unit of a phrase, sentence or so forth entail one particular noun (or choice of nouns).

More or less, if I'm following you correctly, you're trying to figure out the loose translation model by building it up word by word. But that's precisely what the loose translation or paraphrase model rejects.

Remember that any sort of "loose" translation requires a massive amount of knowledge and context of the source that is being translated. 

For example, if someone is translating from Chinese -> English, they need to have a deep understanding of not just the Chinese language, but the culture (as well as English).  That's true for any translation.

The problem for any theory regarding the Book of Mormon is that it isn't analogous to any other translation that has ever been done, so those analogies fail.  The "loose" translation theory fails because Joseph Smith didn't have a deep knowledge of Reformed Egyptian and the context and cultures of what the book covers.  Without God (or some other supernatural entity) telling him what it meant, the "caractors" would just have been gibberish.  He could sit there for 100 years staring at them and never figure it out.

 

Edited August 21, 2019 by cinepro

[clarkgoble]

1 hour ago, cinepro said:

Remember that any sort of "loose" translation requires a massive amount of knowledge and context of the source that is being translated. 

For example, if someone is translating from Chinese -> English, they need to have a deep understanding of not just the Chinese language, but the culture (as well as English).  That's true for any translation.

That really depends upon the methadology used. I tend to agree with you, but to me that's an argument that the translation wasn't done by a normal human. 

The example I've brought up before is the old (pre-neural net) form of Google Translate that correlated sentence fragments to translate. As in say Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment there's no real understanding of language or culture. However you get something like it with odd "mistakes" from culture. Part of the argument for a loose translation is that you'll get precisely those types of errors in the translation either due to some quasi-statistical methodology or due to some other methodolgy.

So more or less what you're doing is critiquing a loose translation by assuming a "normal" tight translation is done first and then paraphrased or a nearest sentence match done. I'm not sure that's a valid assumption. I personally doubt it was God the person with a knowledge of both languages either doing something akin to a normal translation. I'm also pretty deeply skeptical of someone like a resurrected Moroni doing the translation after knowing 16th century English. None of the explanations seem terribly persuasive to me.

We don't fully understand how language is encoded in the brain beyond there not being some foundational "conceptual" language like people used to think decades ago. So if the translation does draw on Joseph Smith's brain it's unclear how that'd work, what kind of errors it'd make and so forth. However if Joseph's mind is part of the process then we'd expect at least some elements akin to "ghost writing" that people like Taves who reject the normal Fraud model support. While I'm very, very skeptical of Taves, she does have the benefit of actually drawing on cognitive science in her analysis (not just of Joseph but broader religious linguistic productions). My problem with Taves is more not engaging with Joseph's presentation of what happened enough. i.e. even in her model Joseph is acting fraudulently.

[champatsch]

22 hours ago, cinepro said:

Ah, seems like only yesterday we were discussing this.  Or 5,384 yesterdays.

Matthew L. Davis, February 1840: "The Mormon Bible, he said, was communicated to him direct from Heaven. If there was such a thing on Earth, as the author of it, then he (Smith) was the author; but the idea that he wished to impress was, that he had penned it, as dictated by God."

2 Nephi 27:24: And again it shall come to pass that the Lord shall say unto him that shall read the words that shall be delivered him:
 

We aren’t usually clear about what we mean when we say that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon. Greater clarity would be helpful going forward since the standard meaning of the term does not apply. Under either view of Book of Mormon translation, Joseph would not have been a translator in today’s most common meaning of the term. Nonetheless, it is important to note that non-default, primary meanings of the relevant terms do apply, and one of these is the first sense listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.

According to the revealed-ideas view, it wasn’t a case of Joseph translating foreign words (or even English words) into his own words; it was a matter of him taking revealed thoughts and putting them into his own words. On this view, the Lord translated the source language for him, turning a foreign language into comprehensible thoughts.

Jan J. Martin provides us with a concrete example in which the peculiar meaning of translator in relation to the Book of Mormon is assumed to be a standard one: “Some argue that Smith merely dictated the English words given to him through the translation instruments, such that he had no influence over the text. In this view, Smith was not the actual translator, but served as the instrument through whom the text was revealed.”* Here Martin uses the term translator with a non-default sense of formulator of words from externally sourced thoughts, although that is not made clear. By not making this clear, she leaves the wrong impression that Joseph would have been a typical translator under a revealed-ideas view. She also states that Joseph would not have been a translator under a revealed-words view, even though he would have been a translator in a non-default sense as well.

As a revelation of words, Joseph’s translation was a conveyance of the book’s words from one condition to another—in this case, from the divine to the temporal. The general sense of ‘conveyance’ is set forth as the first definition of the noun translation and the verb translate in the OED. Thus, even though ‘conveyance’ is not the default meaning for us today, it is nevertheless a primary meaning of the term translation. In addition, Joseph acted as a retransmitter of revealed words, and retransmitter is another relevant definition of translator found in dictionaries, including the OED.

---

* Jan J. Martin, “The Theological Value of the King James Language in the Book of Mormon”, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 27 (2018): 90.

[cinepro]

14 minutes ago, champatsch said:

According to the revealed-ideas view, it wasn’t a case of Joseph translating foreign words (or even English words) into his own words; it was a matter of him taking revealed thoughts and putting them into his own words. On this view, the Lord translated the source language for him, turning a foreign language into comprehensible thoughts.
 

It's a nice idea, but it just doesn't work. 

For example, give me an idea of how you get the money system in Alma 11 with "revealed ideas."

It's not even theoretical.  I'll give you a challenge. 

I speak English, and so do you, so there's no language barrier.  Pretend I've never read the monetary system in Alma 11.  Using any form of words and description, convey Alma 11:1-19 to me using a "loose" description and "thoughts". You just can't actually use the specific names for the money (which would require a "tight" translation). 

What words or ideas will you use that will allow me to write out those 19 verses, including the specific names of the denominations?  What pictures or images will you show me?  Keep in mind that by all accounts, Joseph was dictating about as fast as the scribe could write, but you can have as much time and space as you need to convey the "loose" version of those verses.

 

 

And just to show that I'm fair, I will accept the corollary and show how the "tight" translation would work.  I'll share Alma 11:1-19 using the "tight" translation method.

Here goes:
 

Quote

1 Now it was in the law of Mosiah that every man who was a judge of the law, or those who were appointed to be judges, should receive wages according to the time which they labored to judge those who were brought before them to be judged.

2 Now if a man owed another, and he would not pay that which he did owe, he was complained of to the judge; and the judge executed authority, and sent forth officers that the man should be brought before him; and he judged the man according to the law and the evidences which were brought against him, and thus the man was compelled to pay that which he owed, or be stripped, or be cast out from among the people as a thief and a robber.

3 And the judge received for his wages according to his time—a senine of gold for a day, or a senum of silver, which is equal to a senine of gold; and this is according to the law which was given.

4 Now these are the names of the different pieces of their gold, and of their silver, according to their value. And the names are given by the Nephites, for they did not reckon after the manner of the Jews who were at Jerusalem; neither did they measure after the manner of the Jews; but they altered their reckoning and their measure, according to the minds and the circumstances of the people, in every generation, until the reign of the judges, they having been established by king Mosiah.

5 Now the reckoning is thus—a senine of gold, a seon of gold, a shum of gold, and a limnah of gold.

6 A senum of silver, an amnor of silver, an ezrom of silver, and an onti of silver.

7 A senum of silver was equal to a senine of gold, and either for a measure of barley, and also for a measure of every kind of grain.

8 Now the amount of a seon of gold was twice the value of a senine.

9 And a shum of gold was twice the value of a seon.

10 And a limnah of gold was the value of them all.

11 And an amnor of silver was as great as two senums.

12 And an ezrom of silver was as great as four senums.

13 And an onti was as great as them all.

14 Now this is the value of the lesser numbers of their reckoning—

15 A shiblon is half of a senum; therefore, a shiblon for half a measure of barley.

16 And a shiblum is a half of a shiblon.

17 And a leah is the half of a shiblum.

18 Now this is their number, according to their reckoning.

19 Now an antion of gold is equal to three shiblons.

 

Edited August 21, 2019 by cinepro

[champatsch]

I reject a revealed-ideas view.  I accept a revealed-words view.  Support for a revelation of words includes the following:

1.      Several verses in 2 Nephi 27 indicate a delivery of words.

2.      The dictation of Book of Mormon names and non-English terms must have emanated from a revelation of words.  <= [ to your point ]

3.      Joseph Smith had difficulty pronouncing some of the English words during the dictation.

4.      The wording of the biblical quotations in the Book of Mormon is neither paraphrastic nor a close copy of the King James passages.

5.      A wide variety of phraseology and word choice is textually consistent.

6.      The conjunction and is often used after a complex subordinate clause as a link to the main clause.

7.      Many lexical items potentially convey extrabiblical, obsolete meanings.

8.      The original text’s extensively archaic grammar and syntax are systematically extrabiblical.

Edited August 21, 2019 by champatsch

[champatsch]

Switch vv 18 and 19; ezrom should be ezrum; shiblum should be shilum.

[clarkgoble]

41 minutes ago, cinepro said:

I speak English, and so do you, so there's no language barrier.  Pretend I've never read the monetary system in Alma 11.  Using any form of words and description, convey Alma 11:1-19 to me using a "loose" description and "thoughts". You just can't actually use the specific names for the money (which would require a "tight" translation). 

Again I'd note we have to distinguish between the translation and the control by Joseph Smith. One can accept a loose translation while also accepting tight control so that Joseph has little conscious leeway over the translation. When we don't keep those issues clear I think we end up confusing things (as I think is happening here)

Your argument here is at best an argument for some words having tight translation. That seems reasonable since names that are in the KJV tend to follow the KJV transliteration scheme and new names follow a different transliteration scheme but that the names themselves are pretty consistent. I'd certainly agree that any loose translation can't be totally loose, but I don't think that's what loose translation proponents are arguing. 

Edited August 21, 2019 by clarkgoble

[cinepro]

3 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

 I'd certainly agree that any loose translation can't be totally loose, but I don't think that's what loose translation proponents are arguing. 

That's fair, since I don't think they know what they're arguing either.
 

Edited August 21, 2019 by cinepro

[clarkgoble]

12 minutes ago, cinepro said:

That's fair, since I don't think they know what they're arguing either.

Come on, that level of snark isn't helpful. I provided above an example. It's a claim about the relationship of two texts and how at a word level they match. (Or rather don't match) I made a claim that it was seeing the unit of translation not as the word (typically) but as a sentence or phrase or even longer. I further made a claim based upon statistical methods of translation where you can find a close analogy to that kind of loose translation.

You may disagree, but it doesn't mean the claim isn't well defined.

Heaven knows there are lots of examples of loose translations in literature. Ezra Pound's "translations" of Chinese poetry is probably the best example. Now of course the methodology isn't the same. Pound didn't know Chinese but was reworking more tight translations. And, I'd argue, the Book of Mormon unit of translation is bigger than Pound's. But it gives a pretty good idea of what is being claimed. Quoting from a different writeup on Pound.

"For the English-speaking world, however, this ancient art is effectively less than a hundred years old. Chinese poetry in English was born in 1913, when the widow of Ernest Fenollosa, an American professor who taught at the University of Tokyo, sent Ezra Pound a bundle of her late husband’s notes on Chinese poetry. Fenollosa, who went to Japan to teach philosophy and economics, did not speak any Chinese; he studied these classic texts with Japanese tutors, but needed an interpreter to talk with them. By the time Pound, who knew neither Chinese nor Japanese, transformed Fenollosa’s notes into the poems published in Cathay, his slim volume of 1915, he was thus at least four steps removed from the original Chinese. Yet English speakers knew so little about Chinese poetry that Pound’s versions, however approximate, carried the authority of originals. In a sense, they were originals: as Eliot remarked, Pound was “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time."

Without making a narrow claim as to what the methodology behind the Book of Mormon translation was, I've long thought of this example as a very fruitful one. Note that for those who dispute the tight control by Joseph that Carmack is ably defending, this allows a conscious reworking of an intermediate text other than the gold plate original. That idea of middle steps resolves I think some of the arguments in this thread. I'm definitely not saying that's the way it happend, but thinking through examples like this where a translator doesn't know the original language and produces a loose translation is quite helpful. Typically critiques of translation always think in terms of a model of a single person who has to know both languages. Even ignoring AI techniques of the last thirty years there's a lot of alternatives.

Edited August 21, 2019 by clarkgoble

[champatsch]

1 hour ago, cinepro said:

2 hours ago, champatsch said:

According to the revealed-ideas view, it wasn’t a case of Joseph translating foreign words (or even English words) into his own words; it was a matter of him taking revealed thoughts and putting them into his own words. On this view, the Lord translated the source language for him, turning a foreign language into comprehensible thoughts.
 

It's a nice idea, but it just doesn't work. 

For example, give me an idea of how you get the money system in Alma 11 with "revealed ideas."

You're right, it doesn't work. Now, don't you think Brian Hales and others know this? Either they do or we must lower our estimation of their judgment. Then why do they maintain, against a large amount of textual evidence, an unworkable view of Book of Mormon translation?

[churchistrue]

2 hours ago, champatsch said:

I reject a revealed-ideas view.  I accept a revealed-words view.  Support for a revelation of words includes the following:

1.      Several verses in 2 Nephi 27 indicate a delivery of words.

2.      The dictation of Book of Mormon names and non-English terms must have emanated from a revelation of words.  <= [ to your point ]

3.      Joseph Smith had difficulty pronouncing some of the English words during the dictation.

4.      The wording of the biblical quotations in the Book of Mormon is neither paraphrastic nor a close copy of the King James passages.

5.      A wide variety of phraseology and word choice is textually consistent.

6.      The conjunction and is often used after a complex subordinate clause as a link to the main clause.

7.      Many lexical items potentially convey extrabiblical, obsolete meanings.

8.      The original text’s extensively archaic grammar and syntax are systematically extrabiblical.

This is all related to the dictation, correct?

I think I have heard you say you believe in a loose/humanistic translation that was done externally to Joseph. Is that right?

 

[clarkgoble]

14 hours ago, churchistrue said:

This is all related to the dictation, correct?

I think I have heard you say you believe in a loose/humanistic translation that was done externally to Joseph. Is that right?

That seems to fit the data better than the alternatives. About the only place I'd quibble is that just because the evidence is that people observed tight control with Joseph it doesn't follow it always was tight control. Particularly as he proceeded through the text. If he switched from the Spectacles or Interpreters to his seer stone, for instance, did that affect the nature of the translation? 

I misread the original post so my apologies on that. Clicking through to the earlier thread @cinepro linked to made it clear he meant loose in terms of control not the textual fidelity or style of translation. 

[champatsch]

Maybe cultural and dynamic are better descriptors of the translation. Dynamic captures that the translation is probably a mixture of literal and conceptual. Cultural captures that the translation could have shifted some ancient cultural terms to different modern terms.

[stemelbow]

On 8/20/2019 at 5:09 PM, cinepro said:

Ah, seems like only yesterday we were discussing this.  Or 5,384 yesterdays.

While I'm fascinated by the 16th century flavor of the theory, I still need someone to explain something to me.

How do you get names of people and cities with anything other than a tight translation?

Take, for example, this (an example of a real unknown script):

If I told you this represented a name and asked you to translate it phonetically into the English alphabet using a loose translation, how would you do it?

Now, suppose you had access to a computer called the Great Onicular Decipherer Computer, and it could decipher unknown scripts and show you the phonetic translation on a screen (and then you read it off the screen to a secretary).  So the computer shows you the name as "Puntoalow", and you dictate "Puntoalow" to the secretary.  Again, how would such a thing be possible with a "loose" translation method?

Now, imagine a series of 400 pages of such characters, similarly unknown, for which you rely on the Great Onicular Decipherer Computer to tell you what the symbols mean.  Explain to me how a loose translation would work in this scenario.

 

Bonus question:  Suppose you had a friend, Olly, who was impressed by you being able use the Great Onicular Decipherer Computer to decipher the text, so he asks to try.  You let him, but when he looks into the viewfinder, he sees a message that says "First, you need to study the symbols to try to figure it out, then I'll help you."

How long do you think Olly would need to stare at the symbols before he could figure it out himself?  A week?  A year?  How long does someone need to look at an unknown script before it suddenly becomes intelligible?

I think it goes like this since the names don't really matter:

the ideas are expressed to Joseph's mind.  But he's uneducated and can't really put the words together to make a coherent script, so the ideas are expressed he starts to put phrases together and some divine help comes to dummy down what a divine person might say into ways Joseph might say them.  So for specific names.  Some conglomeration of symbols might best be transliterated into Puntoalow but to Joseph it was really just Zarahemla. not because the symbols would represent Zarahemla, but because somehow the thought occurred to Joseph to just think Zarahemla.  The tool he used helped him spell them out, because although he could say Zarahemla in his mind's eye, he could might not really be able to spell it.  Divine help comes along and helps him spell a name that will never turn up in archaeological finds because it was really just conceived of in Joseph's head.  Thus, you can't really argue the Book of Mormon is not an authentically ancient account of real people living in the Americas.    

[cinepro]

5 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

About the only place I'd quibble is that just because the evidence is that people observed tight control with Joseph it doesn't follow it always was tight control. Particularly as he proceeded through the text. If he switched from the Spectacles or Interpreters to his seer stone, for instance, did that affect the nature of the translation? 

This is what I'm talking about.

How could Joseph "translate" with anything other than tight control?  Explain the process to me.

Let's assume he's translating with the plates, looking at the Reformed Egyptian.  How does anything other than tight control (i.e. him being given the exact words in English) work?

Here's the famous paper showing some of the "caractors" from the plates.  Suppose this part is the start of 1 Nephi 3, including 1 Nephi 3:7.  Joseph sits down and looks at them, and with the help of the U&T, or seer stone, or whatever, what happens if he isn't given the exact English wording?  How does he get from these gibberish caractors that he can't read to 1 Nephi 3:7 without something or someone audibly whispering in his ear, or making the exact words appear before his eyes or in his mind?

And...it...came...to...pass...that...I...Nephi...

Edited August 22, 2019 by cinepro

[clarkgoble]

23 minutes ago, cinepro said:

This is what I'm talking about.

How could Joseph "translate" with anything other than tight control?  Explain the process to me.

I think the claim is that it'd be like when you give a blessing. You get vague ideas that you then search for the right words to express consciously. Now if you ask, well how do those vague ideas get into my mind and what in terms of neurobiology and cognition is going on I can't really say. We barely know how we're able to interpret memories. Further even in the conscious model there's still a lot of work going on unconsciiously. The claim about tight control is just a question of how much flexibility Joseph had. An other possibility with loose control is the example I gave with Pound. You're given a proto-translation that you then consciously rework into a final translation. That might be a very vague proto-translation or something more determinative such as with Pound.

Now Carmack defended the idea that he didn't have a lot of flexibility. There are the accounts that new words were spelled out and that he couldn't continue until he got words right. That suggests that the unit given him was at some times the letter level and some times the word level. The question then becomes whether that was always the case or whether he had more flexibility at times.

In terms of say Taves model you have loose control where there's a vague "image" of the plates and then Joseph ghost wrote the narrative. It is more akin to the question of revelation - even though Taves model doesn't require real revelation but more likely an unconscious production using creative parts of the brain. She explicitly compares it to Pentacostal speaking in tongues which is interesting from a cognitive science perspective but not really a language.

Now we know that elements after publication Joseph had somewhat loose control over. So he changed God to Son of God for instance. Was that because he was just interpreting the passage and clarifying it to a set of criteria somewhat like Pound did? Or was he receiving a new revelation on the subject? We don't know. 

To me the only thing we can say with any confidence is that it appears like Joseph emphasized to others that there was tight control in the process. 

Edited August 22, 2019 by clarkgoble

[Brant Gardner]

Since I tend to get lumped into the "revealed ideas" category, I should try to explain. Clearly, I haven't been able to communicate well as  things get interpreted quickly. I am suggesting that there is a normal process of language creation by which what we intend to say is elevated to speech. This idea posits that there is meaning that becomes represented by words, and the evidence for the underlying meaning comes from those times when there is a glitch in the production system and we say a word that wasn't the one we meant. Often, we don't even know we used the wrong word and someone else has to tell us. We tend to be surprised, because it wasn't our intention.

So, the explanation that there were nebulous ideas and concepts given to Joseph does not describe what I think happened at all. The evidence of the text shows that there are literary structures that survived the translation process, but places where the vocabulary probably didn't preserve some of the original. This is, frankly, much of what a modern translator does. The good translators do not do things word for word, but they understand the sentence and translate the understanding. Sometimes that requires a different syntax. In the case of idioms, it requires different idioms.

I do agree that names, particularly with the corrected spellings, appear to have been given directly.  

At the most severe, I would suggest that the Book of Mormon's relationship to the language on  the plates is similar to the difference between Allen Christensen's literal and literary translation of the Popol Vuh. The smooth English version is faithful to everything in the text, but it doesn't represent the words as they appear in the literal translation.

As a final caution to discussions about the translation of the Book of Mormon, I think it is important to be certain that we are speaking of the same thing. There are three elements involved; 1) original plate language, 2) translation into English, 3) oral transmission from Joseph to a scribe. Skousen and Carmack focus heavily on the implications of number 3, and that makes it seem that they are speaking of 2, when the are not. For me, I think 2 and 3 occur with Joseph, but when someone separates them, it is important to make certain that we are clear about what part of the process we are examining.

[Brant Gardner]

10 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

There are the accounts that new words were spelled out and that he couldn't continue until he got words right. That suggests that the unit given him was at some times the letter level and some times the word level. The question then becomes whether that was always the case or whether he had more flexibility at times.

It is really difficult to suggest that Skousen and Carmack haven't looked at enough data. What they have done is massive. However, there are some important situations that are missed. Here is an example of where the translator misunderstood older forms of English:

1 Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.
2 Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not? hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.
(Isaiah 55:1–2)

50 Come, my brethren, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters; and he that hath no money, come buy and eat; yea, come buy wine and milk without money and without price.
51 Wherefore, do not spend money for that which is of no worth, nor your labor for that which cannot satisfy. Hearken diligently unto me, and remember the words which I have spoken; and come unto the Holy One of Israel, and feast upon that which perisheth not, neither can be corrupted, and let your soul delight in fatness.
(2 Nephi 9:50–51)

2 Nephi 9:51 begins with what might be a quotation from Isaiah 55:2, but it veers off. It keeps a similar meaning, but with different words. Without worrying about that divergence, we have the interesting negation in 2 Nephi 9:51 of a phrase that has no negation in Isaiah 55:2. The reason is that the Isaiah "wherefore" is read in the older sense of "why," and the 2 Nephi 9: 51 uses it as a synonym for "therefore." That change in the understanding of the word required a shift in the meaning. 

There is a similar misreading of Isaiah in 2 Nephi 12: 9:

9 And the mean man boweth not down, and the great man humbleth himself not, therefore, forgive him not. (2 Nephi 12:9)

9 And the mean man boweth down, and the great man humbleth himself: therefore forgive them not. (Isaiah 2:9) 

The difference is that Isaiah refers to the previous verse which speaks of those who brought idols into Judah, and the Book of Mormon verse appears to focus on that particular verse by itself. The translator didn't think that people should not be forgiven for bowing down and being humble, and so a change was made that missed the original meaning. This one isn't from misunderstanding the older meaning of a word, but of too narrow a focus on translation.

 

I would suggest that in both of these cases (and there are others), we have evidence that the translator participated in the creation of the translation, and that the translator made mistakes that can easily be seen with Joseph as the translator. In the case of the wrong meaning of the word, it is a mistake that runs counter to the suggested expertise in the earlier forms of English.
 

[churchistrue]

56 minutes ago, cinepro said:

This is what I'm talking about.

How could Joseph "translate" with anything other than tight control?  Explain the process to me.

Let's assume he's translating with the plates, looking at the Reformed Egyptian.  How does anything other than tight control (i.e. him being given the exact words in English) work?

Here's the famous paper showing some of the "caractors" from the plates.  Suppose this part is the start of 1 Nephi 3, including 1 Nephi 3:7.  Joseph sits down and looks at them, and with the help of the U&T, or seer stone, or whatever, what happens if he isn't given the exact English wording?  How does he get from these gibberish caractors that he can't read to 1 Nephi 3:7 without something or someone audibly whispering in his ear, or making the exact words appear before his eyes or in his mind?

And...it...came...to...pass...that...I...Nephi...

Your answer is D&C 9:8.

[clarkgoble]

1 hour ago, cinepro said:

Suppose this part is the start of 1 Nephi 3, including 1 Nephi 3:7.  Joseph sits down and looks at them, and with the help of the U&T, or seer stone, or whatever, what happens if he isn't given the exact English wording?  How does he get from these gibberish caractors that he can't read to 1 Nephi 3:7 without something or someone audibly whispering in his ear, or making the exact words appear before his eyes or in his mind?

Say he's given vague ideas (not words) like: "Continuance" "new event" "self/reflective" "Nephi" "created/birthed" "out of" "parents" "support". Joseph then, because of his familiarity with other texts interprets that as "and it came to pass I Nephi being born of goodly parents..." Note how the ordering can change as Joseph makes more concrete the ideas and paraphrases it to create a sentence. Now do I think that happened? Not particularly but I suppose we have to acknowledge it as possible.

42 minutes ago, churchistrue said:

Your answer is D&C 9:8.

I'm not sure that gets us too far (and is why I'm sympathetic to Cowdery here). How do you get started? Do you just start picking random words or broad but vague concepts and asking God if they're right? That said, I agree with you that I think any discussion of the translation process has to explain D&C 9. The assumption that it was true for Cowdery but not Joseph seems problematic. Of course there's the added issue of what Cowdery was using to do the translation. Was he using a seer stone? Was he using a dowsing rod? Was he just praying about it in his head? That's a bit unclear. With Joseph at least his early statements about the seer stone suggest it just worked. (Although some of those are late and with his mother's treatment, highly stylized and refined after numerous tellings)

That said, the main argument against tight control is D&C 9 although it doesn't totally resolve the issue. After all D&C 9 could be followed in a manner akin to 20 questions where you keep asking until you narrow it down to the correct English word.

Edited August 22, 2019 by clarkgoble

[clarkgoble]

1 hour ago, Brant Gardner said:

There are three elements involved; 1) original plate language, 2) translation into English, 3) oral transmission from Joseph to a scribe. Skousen and Carmack focus heavily on the implications of number 3, and that makes it seem that they are speaking of 2, when the are not. For me, I think 2 and 3 occur with Joseph, but when someone separates them, it is important to make certain that we are clear about what part of the process we are examining.

I'd actually add an other one prior to your (1). That is plates might be a lossy representation of an original text. So Mormon when compiling the plates is working off of documents that might be in some variant of Hebrew or an indigenous language. He then reproduces it on the plates using a short hand. What is translated? The original texts that in some sense were in Mormon's known languages or the short hand he encodes in into?

While I know some favor the glyphs on the plates are hieratic, the characters that were reproduced simply don't appear to be hieratic. (See @cinepro 's photo of one of the character documents above) So we don't know what type of writing was used at all nor whether it is a word like set of glyphs representing phonemes in some sense like hieratic (when it encodes either Egyptian or other languages such as Hebrew). Further my understanding is that most hieratic is simply a shortened form of hieroglyphics and thus includes both phonetically represented words but also a certain set of ideograms. While some ideograms are obviously word-like, others are much more vague with a much wider semantic meaning than words typically have.

My guess is that the plates simply aren't hieratic at all but are an unique type of shorthand. I think we have to recognize they might be hieratic-like and have hieratic influence, but clearly what one would emphasize relative to hieroglyphics when doing impressions is quite different from a sylized glyph painted with a brush. Hieratic is clearly optimized for quick writing with a brush not impressions on metal or plaster. While again acknowledging that something hieratic-like is possible, I think it's also possible that we have a kind of shorthand that utilizes ideograms.

If we're dealing with ideograms, then syntactic structure need not be followed at all. That in turn means that any translation that doesn't directly know the text  the short hand is representing will be very much a loose paraphrase and have lots of errors. I bring this up since it seems clear that Joseph and his associates clearly thought that was the case with both the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham possibly following Kircher's writings. However it's also possible that Joseph thought this because the Book of Mormon actually was a shorthand of that style and he used that knowledge to try and read what really was hieratic.

I bring all this up simply to note that if Joseph is given in a tight control manner this proto language then he'd of necessity have to fill it in and paraphrase it. (Again, I think the evidence is more towards tight control, but I think we have to acknowledge this as a possibility)

51 minutes ago, Brant Gardner said:

2 Nephi 9:51 begins with what might be a quotation from Isaiah 55:2, but it veers off. It keeps a similar meaning, but with different words.

I 100% think these variants from the KJV when it's clear an original KJV text is being quoted needs to be explained. However I'm not sure that really tells us much about the tight or loose control since these changes could have been done before Joseph received the text. There's no way of knowing if Joseph makes the changes or he's given a text that already has those modifications. That's why it's so important to keep clear and distinct control vs. the nature of the text.

51 minutes ago, Brant Gardner said:

I would suggest that in both of these cases (and there are others), we have evidence that the translator participated in the creation of the translation, and that the translator made mistakes that can easily be seen with Joseph as the translator. In the case of the wrong meaning of the word, it is a mistake that runs counter to the suggested expertise in the earlier forms of English.

Certainly these texts are compatible with the idea that Joseph made the mistake. But assume for a moment that we're instead dealing with someone else (say Moroni) doing the translation and giving it via the Spectacles to Joseph. There's no way to distinguish between where the error is made.

The only thing that possibly could be distinguished is whether the translation was done in the EModE period or was done by someone in the 19th century who knew EModE by finding examples of grammar common in the 19th century but not the EModE period. However while that'd be an interesting question I don't think it'd get us very far towards the question of whether it was Joseph Smith, an other 19th cenutry figure or some more abstract process that conducted the translation.

Edited August 22, 2019 by clarkgoble

[clarkgoble]

7 hours ago, champatsch said:

Maybe cultural and dynamic are better descriptors of the translation. Dynamic captures that the translation is probably a mixture of literal and conceptual. Cultural captures that the translation could have shifted some ancient cultural terms to different modern terms.

I'm not sure that ends up being that helpful. I think what you mean by cultural is semantic drift. i.e. a Spaniard using "bow" to describe an "atlatl." It seems to me that more just acknowledges that both connotation and denotation can change in different environments even when doing a relatively strict word level translation. Typically by finding a nearest neighbor fit in terms of resemblance between the properties of what is referenced. i.e. deer and cow have many similar properties - more than say cow and table.

What I'm calling loose is more about textual variance above the word level. That could be the sentence fragment level, the sentence level, or even larger levels. I think that whoever or however the translation was done, that in terms of word level fidelity it's a loose translation. There's really no other way to explain post-exilic quotations or paraphrases except by postulating that Moroni had read and was deeply familiar with the greek and hebrew texts of the post-Christian era. While possible and something apologists have postulated, it seems dubious and at minimum is a huge assumption. 

 

Edited August 22, 2019 by clarkgoble