new Oxford Annotated Book of Mormon

[Calm]

10 minutes ago, Tacenda said:

Oh, thank you! I was unsure, maybe I need to be at church more.

If you are interested in what the Church publishes, you can always check the online store on the Church’s website.  They do have some recently published quality books these days, such as the Saints volumes and the RS discourses.

I don’t know if the policy is still in force, but when I was a bookstore employee, I am relatively certain I found out that the Church Distribution stuff was sold at cost rather than making any profit in scriptures, manuals, etc.  The owner of the bookstore would drive down to Utah all the time to pick up the Church stuff he sold in his two stores in Alberta.  He got a 10% discount by doing so because he saved them the money for shipping it to the Canadian distribution center (because the Church swallows that cost for members and sells it for the same wherever you buy it), otherwise there was no discount like was usually offered by publishers to booksellers (who typically had to pay 40 to 60% of retail value of a book) because the Church Distribution sold their stuff at cost and so could not afford to given incentive discounts to the stores who wanted to sell their stuff.

I would always tell people when I wasn’t working (because we sold scriptures in the store, so it wouldn’t be fair to my employer to tell them to get them somewhere else as much as I wanted to) to buy scriptures through the Church online as soooo much cheaper.

[Kevin Christensen]

The From the Desk website has an interview with Grant Hardy on The Annotated Book of Mormon.

https://www.fromthedesk.org/annotated-book-of-mormon-grant-hardy/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=annotated-book-of-mormon-grant-hardy

Quite interesting.   Incidentally, I have a two part review coming in Interpreter.  I just got to look over the prepublication proof of Part 1.

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

[Kevin Christensen]

The first part of my review has appeared.

https://journal.interpreterfoundation.org/an-important-addition-to-the-library/

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

[caspianrex]

On 1/1/2024 at 9:25 PM, Nevo said:

I was really impressed by the 12 essays in the back. They're outstanding. I haven't dug deeply into the notes yet, but I'm sure they're excellent too. Hardy is an exceptional reader, but I especially value his judgment. For me, it's a plus that he doesn't cite Ethan Sproat or promote Margaret Barker's theories. His discussion of Early Modern English on pages 753–754 is the best I've seen. 

Most of the maps and charts are the same as in the Maxwell Institute version. Unlike the Maxwell Institute version, however, this book uses the public domain 1920 text because "the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints prefers that its current 2013 scriptural text (a slight adjustment of the 1981 edition) be published with the Church's own formatting."

@caspianrex liked the layout of the book. I am not a fan. A lot of the font choices (starting with the cover!) are not to my taste at all. Unlike The New Oxford Annotated Bible, which was designed by 2K/Denmark and printed by Royal Jongbloed, with line-matched type and a sewn binding, this book was designed by an in-house designer, printed in the US by Sheridan Books, is not line matched, and has a glued binding. And unlike the The New Oxford Annotated Bible, it does not lie flat. Also, in my copy, the printing is blurry through most of 2 Nephi. However, the paper is quite thick and opaque, so there's virtually no ghosting. You could probably write marginal notes and highlight with little or no bleed-through.

This is a great study edition of the Book of Mormon, but don't expect it to hold up to heavy use.

 

Your criticism of the binding is certainly valid, and you're definitely right about the book not lying flat. However, compared to the paperback-only Maxwell Institute Study Edition (as well as the paperback version of Hardy's original Reader's Edition), I think the hardcover is a vast improvement.

As to the cover, I like the artwork, but the typeface isn't very creative. (Looks like it may just be Times New Roman?)

[caspianrex]

On 1/1/2024 at 9:25 PM, Nevo said:

I was really impressed by the 12 essays in the back. They're outstanding. I haven't dug deeply into the notes yet, but I'm sure they're excellent too. Hardy is an exceptional reader, but I especially value his judgment. For me, it's a plus that he doesn't cite Ethan Sproat or promote Margaret Barker's theories. His discussion of Early Modern English on pages 753–754 is the best I've seen. 

Most of the maps and charts are the same as in the Maxwell Institute version. Unlike the Maxwell Institute version, however, this book uses the public domain 1920 text because "the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints prefers that its current 2013 scriptural text (a slight adjustment of the 1981 edition) be published with the Church's own formatting."

@caspianrex liked the layout of the book. I am not a fan. A lot of the font choices (starting with the cover!) are not to my taste at all. Unlike The New Oxford Annotated Bible, which was designed by 2K/Denmark and printed by Royal Jongbloed, with line-matched type and a sewn binding, this book was designed by an in-house designer, printed in the US by Sheridan Books, is not line matched, and has a glued binding. And unlike the The New Oxford Annotated Bible, it does not lie flat. Also, in my copy, the printing is blurry through most of 2 Nephi. However, the paper is quite thick and opaque, so there's virtually no ghosting. You could probably write marginal notes and highlight with little or no bleed-through.

This is a great study edition of the Book of Mormon, but don't expect it to hold up to heavy use.

 

Your criticism of the binding is certainly valid, and you're definitely right about the book not lying flat. However, compared to the paperback-only Maxwell Institute Study Edition (as well as the paperback version of Hardy's original Reader's Edition), I think the hardcover is a vast improvement.

As to the cover, I like the artwork, but the typeface isn't very creative. (Looks like it may just be Times New Roman?)

[caspianrex]

Hm...can't figure out why that last comment double-posted. Also, there doesn't seem to be any option for me to delete the duplicate comment. Weird.

[Calm]

3 hours ago, caspianrex said:

Hm...can't figure out why that last comment double-posted. Also, there doesn't seem to be any option for me to delete the duplicate comment. Weird.

You can’t remove an entire post as if you never posted, you can only remove the contents.  It’s a glitch that happens quite a bit, but not as often as it used to.  You will often get a warning that you just made a post and it’s too soon to make another one (iow, it’s guessing you double clicked).  I just delete every and put “dup” for duplicate when it happens to me.  It usually does this when it seems like it took longer to load than normal or I have obviously clicked it, but nothing has changed.

Edited March 8, 2024 by Calm

[darkrats]

On 2/21/2023 at 1:06 AM, Hamilton Porter said:

Great. How many of you have seen the Maxwell Institute version? I'm glad I kept putting off forking over money on that one, until the sexier Oxford version came out.

I tried to send you a message, but it says I have 0 messages left for this day. Try later. I've never sent anyone a message before. Do you know why I cannot send you a message? Thanks.

[Calm]

4 hours ago, darkrats said:

I tried to send you a message, but it says I have 0 messages left for this day. Try later. I've never sent anyone a message before. Do you know why I cannot send you a message? Thanks.

You don’t have enough posts, you need 25

[champatsch]

On 1/2/2024 at 3:25 AM, Nevo said:

His discussion of Early Modern English on pages 753–754 is the best I've seen.

I will let you know what I think of Hardy's discussion once I am able to read it. It is likely to be similar to what he wrote in 2018 and 2021 for BYU Studies. There he writes as if we were still back in the time of B.H. Roberts, as if we don't have access to hundreds of thousands of digitized texts from 1470 to 1830.

As some of you know, I'm an expert on the subject and he isn't, although in this BYU Studies article he wrote that I assert things about Book of Mormon English, insinuating that he doesn't. (He has carried out a sliver of the amount of comparative linguistic study that I have, and he doesn’t have the general and specific preparation in linguistic analysis that I have.)

He also deliberately understated the number of nonbiblical lexical archaisms that are in the Book of Mormon in that 2018 paper, even though he had contributed through the years to Royal Skousen's study of such!

And in this BYU Studies article he just repeated the old, uninformed consensus view about nonstandard grammar and biblical material and Joseph Smith's editing of the Book of Mormon. He didn't even mention counterexamples to the consensus that he is well aware of.

I know that most of you think he's a very good, reliable scholar, but as for things that I know much more about than him, I can tell that he isn't.

[OGHoosier]

2 hours ago, champatsch said:

I will let you know what I think of Hardy's discussion once I am able to read it.

I would very much look forward to this.

[champatsch]

The good news is that Hardy did not repeat the inaccuracies of his two BYU studies papers in this essay. He made it more accurate. So his description in this essay is a better representation of the reality of Book of Mormon English usage.

He mentions the {-th} plural and periphrastic did and finite clausal complementation after verbs of influence, which he gets from I wrote for the text-critical work NOL:

Quote

None of these constructions, which were pervasive in the Book of Mormon, are characteristic of either the King James Bible or Joseph Smith's personal writings, yet they can be found in similar ratios and usage patterns in some books from the sixteenth century. (page 753, bottom)

This isn't fully accurate. I think I really just said this about periphrastic did. Maybe what I wrote wasn't clear. I'll check the wording in NOL later.

In the case of complementation after suasive verbs, there is probably no text that has the degree of finite complementation after these verbs as we see in the Book of Mormon, mainly due to cause and suffer. In a paper, I mention that Caxton's Golden Legend (1483) almost reaches the Book of Mormon's rate of finite complementation when only the verb command is considered. (It has more instances, since it is a longer text than the Book of Mormon; and it's about 60% finite where the Book of Mormon is 80% finite, after command.)

I didn't check individual texts for levels of non-3sg {-th}, although I do know the usage was more frequent in the 16c than in the 17c. And the Book of Mormon has the full array of non-3sg {-th} usage, as occurred during the early modern period, which pseudo-archaic texts do not have.

More later.

[champatsch]

On page 754, Hardy writes about Webster's 1828 dictionary, ADEL. He says several archaic definitions of proposed Book of Mormon archaisms are found there. Look, by now, Hardy should present readers with a more nuanced or advanced view of Book of Mormon lexical meaning in relation to the ADEL than this. He's known about this longer than I have. Skousen first became aware of the possibility of nonbiblical lexical archaism in the 1990s and first published on it in 2005. Hardy would have seen that in 2005, but I was working in another area at the time and didn't learn about it until 2013. And Hardy himself contributed to Skousen's study of archaic meanings in the Book of Mormon after 2005.

Also, as a scholar, if Hardy is going to use the ADEL as an authority, then he should consider at least one relevant paper, such as Joseph Reed's 1962 analysis in American Speech of how Webster put together the dictionary, and his tremendous debt to Johnson, even though he strongly criticized him. There we learn that he borrowed heavily from Johnson, whose dictionary first came out in 1755 and 1756, and that Webster also inserted some 'new' obsolete and archaic meanings, often without indicating obsolescence. So these Webster definitions must be checked in the OED, which is now the first authority, because it was crowd-sourced and is replete with examples. In any event, even if there was more persistence than Skousen's current analysis shows, there are still plenty of cases in the Book of Mormon where there is no evidence for persistence, and for which the ADEL is inadequate.

To be clear. Hardy knows the ADEL is inadequate and clearly inferior to the OED for studying lexical meaning in the Book of Mormon. And yet he mentions the ADEL in preference to the OED in this essay published by Oxford!

[champatsch]

On Early English Books Online, it has about 1.45 billion words not 750 million words, which is what Hardy wrote in this essay.

[champatsch]

Hardy suggests that unusual Book of Mormon phrases might have just coincidentally occurred in Early Modern English. The backstory to this is that he proposed a number of phrases in a paper that he thought were typical 19c phrases. But they also occurred earlier, in the early modern period. And in the Book of Mormon, these phrases are surrounded by early modern syntax. So the early modern view of the phrases is stronger, but he doesn't want it to be, and of course it's academically unpopular. So he writes here that their occurrence earlier might be coincidental.

As I indicated in a paper, content-rich phrases are much weaker evidence for authorship than syntax, so ultimately they aren't dispositive for authorship. But non-linguist academics seem to think these phrases show 19c origins for the Book of Mormon, so they cling to them. I think this is a case of understandable, if weak, academic posturing.

And there's a double standard, which Hardy gives evidence for here. It's okay for academics to say that phrases that occurred in both the early modern and late modern period are 19c phrases, but it's not okay to say they are early modern phrases, even though the surrounding syntax is quite heavily early modern in character.

Edited March 28, 2024 by champatsch

[champatsch]

On grammar. To his credit, Hardy mentions that much of the bad grammar in the Book of Mormon was found in Early Modern English, but he suggests that some of it might have independently come from Joseph Smith.

Hardy knows about some important types of bad grammar that Joseph wasn't responsible for, and at the same time he needs to study grammaticality much more seriously and comparatively in order to have reliable things to say about other types of bad grammar in the Book of Mormon.

At the moment, I can think of at least 4 types of bad grammar that Hardy knew – when he wrote this essay – were not Joseph Smith's bad grammar. And he didn't mention the two principal ones. The first type is the extra and usage connecting some complex subordinate clauses with main clauses. Hardy's known about this since 1992, well before I learned about it. There are more than 40 of these. The second type, which he is quite familiar with, since he is a Book of Mormon editor and has studied the critical text, are the 37 instances of object they (they in object position), 23 of these being "they which", which wasn't Joseph Smith's native usage either. Neither of these is pseudo-biblical usage. The first is non-English usage, the second is early modern usage.

So, in this essay Hardy suggests that some bad grammar might have come from Joseph, but he decides not to mention any of the bad grammar that he knows did not come from him.

[Ryan Dahle]

7 hours ago, champatsch said:

So, in this essay Hardy suggests that some bad grammar might have come from Joseph, but he decides not to mention any of the bad grammar that he knows did not come from him.

This is why I've been so unimpressed with many of the responses to what is now more than a decade of your remarkable research on the Book of Mormon's linguistic features. When certain types of linguistic evidence are repeatedly downplayed or outright ignored, it may be a good sign that competing positions simply can't account for it. 

[Kevin Christensen]

The second part of my review of Hardy's The Annotated Book of Mormon has appeared.  Rather long, even for me.  But an important book requires serious attention.

https://journal.interpreterfoundation.org/nurture-and-harvest-a-continued-conversation-with-the-annotated-book-of-mormon/

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA