Book of Mormon: "never again will it be known as a simple hoax."

[_Dr Exiled]

I asked Mr. Carmack over at MD&D about the oral v. written issue and his Early Modern English enterprise. His answer was basically that he didn't entertain the possibility that Joseph Smith's backwoods dialect could be the source of the Early Modern English (thank Clark Goble for giving Mr. Carmack a safe space to answer) In any event, not even considering the oral possibility for Joseph's Early Modern English is telling. There aren't any recordings of Early Modern English speakers so finding suitable media to study would be tough, but leaving out this possibility given what other linguists have posited of certain isolated populations and their dialect being similar to Early Modern English, today, seems to be a huge hole in the hypothesis.
http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/710 ... ys/?page=4

[_Dr Exiled]

ouch:

Since Skousen and Carmack have discovered that the Book of Mormon’s language is drawn from a linguistic era lasting at least 270 years (1470-1740 AD), Skousen figures no one man could live that long to finish the project by himself...several people would have had to have worked on the project.

That’s where my hypothesis comes in. The Three Nephites aren’t subject to death, and that gave them the time and the means to stay on the project for hundreds of years without handing it over to anyone else.

I'd say "fiasco" is the right description.

Hahaha. The three nephites have to play a role here, right after they fix my flat tire .....

[_Gadianton]

I asked Mr. Carmack over at MD&D about the oral v. written issue and his Early Modern English enterprise. His answer was basically that he didn't entertain the possibility that Joseph Smith's backwoods dialect could be the source of the Early Modern English (thank Clark Goble for giving Mr. Carmack a safe space to answer) In any event, not even considering the oral possibility for Joseph's Early Modern English is telling. There aren't any recordings of Early Modern English speakers so finding suitable media to study would be tough, but leaving out this possibility given what other linguists have posited of certain isolated populations and their dialect being similar to Early Modern English, today, seems to be a huge hole in the hypothesis.
http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/710 ... ys/?page=4

If I were reading words off a magic rock powered by the Lord, I would do everything in my power to make sure whoever published and printed the book I was revealing not change a single character. Isn't the "thousands of changes" to the Book of Mormon text under the assumption that there was lots grammatical errors sort of assume that it was oral rather than written?

I guess the defense would be, Oliver made scribal errors, so there was no way around editing. But seems like they're in a fork. If you don't admit Oliver and Joseph Smith made mistakes, then can't account for why they would let the publishers change the text. And if you do admit Oliver and Joseph Smith made mistakes, it's tantamount to admitting in parts it's an oral text. Between Joseph Smith slipping up and saying "they was" instead of "they were" as his backwoods speaking changed wording or inserted wording accidentally, and Oliver hearing what was being read to him in backwoods English, seems like can't avoid it.

[_Dr Exiled]

I asked Mr. Carmack over at MD&D about the oral v. written issue and his Early Modern English enterprise. His answer was basically that he didn't entertain the possibility that Joseph Smith's backwoods dialect could be the source of the Early Modern English (thank Clark Goble for giving Mr. Carmack a safe space to answer) In any event, not even considering the oral possibility for Joseph's Early Modern English is telling. There aren't any recordings of Early Modern English speakers so finding suitable media to study would be tough, but leaving out this possibility given what other linguists have posited of certain isolated populations and their dialect being similar to Early Modern English, today, seems to be a huge hole in the hypothesis.
http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/710 ... ys/?page=4

If I were reading words off a magic rock powered by the Lord, I would do everything in my power to make sure whoever published and printed the book I was revealing not change a single character. Isn't the "thousands of changes" to the Book of Mormon text under the assumption that there was lots grammatical errors sort of assume that it was oral rather than written?

I guess the defense would be, Oliver made scribal errors, so there was no way around editing. But seems like they're in a fork. If you don't admit Oliver and Joseph Smith made mistakes, then can't account for why they would let the publishers change the text. And if you do admit Oliver and Joseph Smith made mistakes, it's tantamount to admitting in parts it's an oral text. Between Joseph Smith slipping up and saying "they was" instead of "they were" as his backwoods speaking changed wording or inserted wording accidentally, and Oliver hearing what was being read to him in backwoods English, seems like can't avoid it.

I think this will prove to be a huge waste of time from the apologist perspective. Early Modern English in the Book of Mormon itself is too "archaic" for the average member. Also, the oral issue is too big to discount and possibilities will be used against them in this case. One simply will not be able to say with any probability that Joseph Smith could not have been the source of whatever Early Modern English is found in the reconstructed text. The "Lord's" supposed influence simply cannot rise above the 50/50 threshhold here and the case is not shown.

And for God's sake, it depends on a magic rock ....

[_tapirrider]

I'm just skeptical of the entire thesis.

For example, this article identifies "in them days", "had smote" and "was yet wroth" and goes on to make a case for the argument.
https://www.mormoninterpreter.com/a-loo ... n-grammar/

Me being a nobody, all I did was go to google book advanced, typed in the search fields and limited it to no later than 1830 and got many results. Here are just three examples from 1825.

them days, 1825
https://books.google.com/books?id=lIbvT ... &q&f=false

had smote, 1825
https://books.google.com/books?id=Q5xJA ... &q&f=false

they were yet, 1825
https://books.google.com/books?id=gygPA ... &q&f=false

For me it isn't a matter of whether Joseph Smith had access to these books, that isn't the point. It is that what Carmack identifies as nonstandard form is still clearly found in published books of the time period when the Book of Mormon was published.

But like I said, I'm just a skeptic when it comes to claims of the miraculous.

[_Philo Sofee]

Physics Guy on Mormon Discussions hit the nail on the head so far as I am concerned.

"There are people on this very board who seem to claim, on the strength of your work, that 19th century authorship of the Book of Mormon has been ruled out definitively. Would you really go that far?

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

That is the powerful argument apologists are going to have to overcome with their research. If any of this is for real, then put it out there for the world at large, after all, isn't that the actual audience that matters to them?

[_Symmachus]

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

1. Using the OED means you are explicitly and only relying not just on written but on published sources.

2. Published = undergoing some kind of editorial process by which a given manuscript is edited according to the norms of a written standard. The first dialectical victim of this process would be syntax.

3. Therefore, any dialectical features of the syntax—which is Carmack / Skousen's strongest category of evidence, albeit it their examples are very meager—would be filtered out.

The most you can do, then, is say that the Book of Mormon language of 1830 does not fully conform to the expectations of the current written standard. It is absurd to claim that Joseph Smith spoke the written standard, since no one today even speaks the written standard of English. There is always a gap between spoken and written, and this gap is obviously much wider with someone whose literacy level is relatively low.

That fits better with written than oral. (Of course there are plenty of short, simple sentences that could be oral, . . . or written.) For example, complex finite verb complementation (more than 100 cases in the Book of Mormon) is not simple or illiterate language. Modal shall usage, which is prevalent in the Book of Mormon, is something that can be found in more formal registers in the 19c, such as legal language.

100 examples in a 500 page book. WOW!

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

There's your problem: you have a small corpus against which to compare the meager examples that could conceivably used as evidence of Joseph Smith's dialect (published newspapers aren't written to reflect a dialect) found by Carmack and Skousen, and yet they make a gigantic claim.

Carmack and Skousen are using the absence of evidence as evidence of absence.

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

So, there is an example of preservation (in writing presumably) of a syntactical feature that Carmack finds significant. That proves that it could be maintained in a dialect of English that was not far from Joseph Smith's own. It's not so very far-fetched to suggest that some of these features might have been maintained, then.

The Book of Mormon was dictated. If Joseph was the author, then it's an oral text. If he wasn't the author, then it isn't necessarily an oral text. There are no contractions in the original manuscript. That fits with written or very careful oral. There are many complicated sentences and there is a lot of high level language.

He's muddying the terms. The Book of Mormon was dictated, yes, but it was not a transcription. It was written down by more educated scribes, so the point about contraction is irrelevant, since the scribes would have filtered that out in the process of writing as non-standard forms.

I am astonished that a linguist would assume that oral = not complicated and could not "high level" language. Carmack should spend some time with a vast body of work on Homeric poetry, or the Rig Veda, or the Old Avestan Gathas (or Old English poetry, to a lesser extent), to say nothing of the work on Guslars of Slavic-speaking Balkans, all of which were/are oral texts until some point of dictation and even after that, and all of which were/are highly complex and are the very exemplars of high level language in their respective traditions.

The Book of Mormon language is a genuine Kunstsprache. It is not just that it is formulaic and displays many of the features of an oral composition (e.g. chiasmus, which is in origin a mnemonic technique used in oral composition to maintain narrative structure). It is also heavily dependent on a discourse that had achieved canonical status in his own time: the KJV. Of course, the apologists make a big deal that Joseph Smith isn't recorded as reading the Bible, which is because his exposure was chiefly oral/aural through 1) having it read to him by his mother and 2) hearing quoted directly and 3) exposure to language that imitated the style and register of the KJV. This was a text whose patterns of speech permeated English, especially in non-urban communities, well into the 20th century. It was all around him. It also contains the handful of features the Skousen and Carmack have isolated.

Isolation, again, is the key to their whole edifice: find a handful of examples, claim that they couldn't have been part of Joseph Smith's dialect or that he couldn't have been exposed to them, then find their use in their use in the Elizabethan period and, voilà! the Book of Mormon is in Elizabethan English. Anyone who wants to test the hypothesis need do nothing more than read some 16th century English for a few hours. Beyond a few minor examples that are otherwise relatively easily explained, no one who does that could reasonably conclude that the language of the Book of Mormon is from the 16th century.

[_Dr Exiled]

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

1. Using the OED means you are explicitly and only relying not just on written but on published sources.

2. Published = undergoing some kind of editorial process by which a given manuscript is edited according to the norms of a written standard. The first dialectical victim of this process would be syntax.

3. Therefore, any dialectical features of the syntax—which is Carmack / Skousen's strongest category of evidence, albeit it their examples are very meager—would be filtered out.

The most you can do, then, is say that the Book of Mormon language of 1830 does not fully conform to the expectations of the current written standard. It is absurd to claim that Joseph Smith spoke the written standard, since no one today even speaks the written standard of English. There is always a gap between spoken and written, and this gap is obviously much wider with someone whose literacy level is relatively low.

That fits better with written than oral. (Of course there are plenty of short, simple sentences that could be oral, . . . or written.) For example, complex finite verb complementation (more than 100 cases in the Book of Mormon) is not simple or illiterate language. Modal shall usage, which is prevalent in the Book of Mormon, is something that can be found in more formal registers in the 19c, such as legal language.

100 examples in a 500 page book. WOW!

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

There's your problem: you have a small corpus against which to compare the meager examples that could conceivably used as evidence of Joseph Smith's dialect (published newspapers aren't written to reflect a dialect) found by Carmack and Skousen, and yet they make a gigantic claim.

Carmack and Skousen are using the absence of evidence as evidence of absence.

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

So, there is an example of preservation (in writing presumably) of a syntactical feature that Carmack finds significant. That proves that it could be maintained in a dialect of English that was not far from Joseph Smith's own. It's not so very far-fetched to suggest that some of these features might have been maintained, then.

The Book of Mormon was dictated. If Joseph was the author, then it's an oral text. If he wasn't the author, then it isn't necessarily an oral text. There are no contractions in the original manuscript. That fits with written or very careful oral. There are many complicated sentences and there is a lot of high level language.

He's muddying the terms. The Book of Mormon was dictated, yes, but it was not a transcription. It was written down by more educated scribes, so the point about contraction is irrelevant, since the scribes would have filtered that out in the process of writing as non-standard forms.

I am astonished that a linguist would assume that oral = not complicated and could not "high level" language. Carmack should spend some time with a vast body of work on Homeric poetry, or the Rig Veda, or the Old Avestan Gathas (or Old English poetry, to a lesser extent), to say nothing of the work on Guslars of Slavic-speaking Balkans, all of which were/are oral texts until some point of dictation and even after that, and all of which were/are highly complex and are the very exemplars of high level language in their respective traditions.

The Book of Mormon language is a genuine Kunstsprache. It is not just that it is formulaic and displays many of the features of an oral composition (e.g. chiasmus, which is in origin a mnemonic technique used in oral composition to maintain narrative structure). It is also heavily dependent on a discourse that had achieved canonical status in his own time: the KJV. Of course, the apologists make a big deal that Joseph Smith isn't recorded as reading the Bible, which is because his exposure was chiefly oral/aural through 1) having it read to him by his mother and 2) hearing quoted directly and 3) exposure to language that imitated the style and register of the KJV. This was a text whose patterns of speech permeated English, especially in non-urban communities, well into the 20th century. It was all around him. It also contains the handful of features the Skousen and Carmack have isolated.

Isolation, again, is the key to their whole edifice: find a handful of examples, claim that they couldn't have been part of Joseph Smith's dialect or that he couldn't have been exposed to them, then find their use in their use in the Elizabethan period and, voilà! the Book of Mormon is in Elizabethan English. Anyone who wants to test the hypothesis need do nothing more than read some 16th century English for a few hours. Beyond a few minor examples that are otherwise relatively easily explained, no one who does that could reasonably conclude that the language of the Book of Mormon is from the 16th century.

You nailed it. I wonder how Skousen/Carmack would respond to the above? I wonder if Dr. Peterson would be so kind as to respond to this?

This Early Modern English enterprise seems to be destined to be like chiasmus, something to point to but completely useless as evidence for a divine Book of Mormon. I guess it is back to the tried and true process of desire to believe until delusion and good feelings to justify the delusion.

[_Symmachus]

You nailed it. I wonder how Skousen/Carmack would respond to the above? I wonder if Dr. Peterson would be so kind as to respond to this?

This Early Modern English enterprise seems to be destined to be like chiasmus, something to point to but completely useless as evidence for a divine Book of Mormon. I guess it is back to the tried and true process of desire to believe until delusion and good feelings to justify the delusion.

You know, I wish I could discuss this with them, at least Skousen and Carmack. Peterson is not someone I take at all seriously, but there is no question that the other two seem to me to be serious scholars. You will find, if you dig into the literature, that there is very little work done on English dialects historically, especially on syntax, because the evidence is so meager; publication generally meant standardization, and most writers were educated, so that means the speech of most of the population (who were uneducated) has gone largely unrecorded. They might actually have made a genuine discovery here, if not about the dialect more broadly at least about the linguistic pressures that surround the production of the Book of Mormon, from whatever source.

I think this 16th century business is a distraction that becomes absurd to the extent that Skousen and Carmack present their research as nothing more than observations. The idea that seventeenth century English miraculously injected itself into 1830 America is not a mere observation. 100% of linguists not devoted to Mormonism (and probably a large percentage of those that are) would not pole-vault to the conclusion that they have, and unfortunately it means they don't see what they've really got their hands on and how it might actually add to knowledge. They seem more interested in adding to faith.

And I also don't understand why, for even a die-hard literalist, any of this detracts from the believing claims about the Book of Mormon. Supposing that their handful of examples are 1) merely features of Joseph Smith's dialect, 2) overwrought imitations of KJV language, or 3) some combination of those; in no way would that tell us anything about whether the Book of Mormon was really translated from a set of gold tablets buried in the backyard of semi-literate day-laborer in upstate New York who learned of their existence and location with a help of an angel. That may very well have happened, but emphatic past tense syntax isn't a clue in that mystery.