Early Modern English and asserting ?????proof????? of Book of Mormon

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_honorentheos
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Re: Early Modern English and asserting “proof” of Book of Mormon

Post by _honorentheos »

Gadianton wrote:
Sun Aug 23, 2020 6:49 pm
That's a fantastic example, Lemmie.
Amen. Nice work, Lemmie.
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_Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Early Modern English and asserting “proof” of Book of Mormon

Post by _Doctor CamNC4Me »

Wow. Lemmie nailed his ass to the wall. Draw a bullseye around that, Skousen.

- Doc
_Symmachus
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Re: Early Modern English and asserting “proof” of Book of Mormon

Post by _Symmachus »

Wow, Lemmie. That is an amazing discovery. I thought the game was rigged rhetorically (their reliance on absence of available data as a point of comparison), but I had no inkling the rigging went down to this level. This is willful distortion on Skousen’s part. He’s actually adjusting the evidence to fit his theory.
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_Dr Exiled
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Re: Early Modern English and asserting “proof” of Book of Mormon

Post by _Dr Exiled »

Nice job, Lemmie. Maybe the mystery supporter(s) of Interpreter should ask for Skousen to refund the money he took these past years for this embarrassing project?
"Religion is about providing human community in the guise of solving problems that don’t exist or failing to solve problems that do and seeking to reconcile these contradictions and conceal the failures in bogus explanations otherwise known as theology." - Kishkumen 
_Physics Guy
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Re: Early Modern English and asserting “proof” of Book of Mormon

Post by _Physics Guy »

I add my applause. Note that Lemmie isn’t saying that only the corrected “desirable” reading should count, here, though it’s an interesting point that Smith and collaborators were willing to make such corrections to a supposedly tight translation by God. Lemmie is saying that Skousen is calling which emendation to count as the original text and also calling which usages are archaic. So he has an opportunity to pick the most archaic options each time. Does he exploit this? He could. It’s a good reason to get the second opinion of real peer review.
_Physics Guy
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Re: Early Modern English and asserting “proof” of Book of Mormon

Post by _Physics Guy »

@Symmachus re R. Smith, Skousen and Carmack:

Yeah, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and a PhD really only represents a little knowledge. When I got mine I had two publications. Now I have somewhere around 50—and I’m a bit under-published for a person of my age and rank in my field. The magic mountain is high. Having a PhD is a good sign as far as it goes, but touting it as a decisive sign is a bad sign.

I didn’t know that R. Smith was an adult convert. That explains a bit. He’s paid the ante.

Skousen did a sabbatical once at the Max-Planck Institute where my wife was a post-doc, a few years after she left. It’s a significant center, so Skousen wasn’t a complete recluse at that time, but MPIs have ample guest space that may as well go to someone and they’re often generous about whom they let visit. Outreach slash noblesse oblige. I used to know the people there, though, and I’m really curious what they made of Royal Skousen. We met up with one of them again a couple of years ago and I forgot to ask. Maybe next time.

Discovering that detail of Skousen’s CV made me curious enough to look up some of Skousen’s work a while back. My impression of Skousen’s metrical linguistics model was that it was way too simplistic to take at all seriously but no doubt supportable in selected examples. If there’s any way in which linguistics should try to be more like physics I don’t think it’s this one. It’s not an utter surprise that he’s now letting a simplistic model convince him of something absurd.

And Carmack seems to be the sorcerer’s apprentice.
_Lemmie
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Re: Early Modern English and asserting “proof” of Book of Mormon

Post by _Lemmie »

Thanks, guys! I appreciate your comments.

Re:PG’s comment about exploitation, I would agree it looks like an opportunity. But even if Skousen had no nefarious intent, there is a possibility of subconscious influence. At a minimum, this would have been the place for some sort of a disclaimer giving links to his decision to change the Original Manuscript by removing the work of an original scribe.

Or, to keep harping on my long-standing point, have it peer reviewed at a reputable journal.
_Physics Guy
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Re: Early Modern English and asserting “proof” of Book of Mormon

Post by _Physics Guy »

Right and important. It's not about doubting Skousen's good intentions to be honest. Subconscious bias is the devil that you can only beat by letting a devil's advocate fire away.
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Re: Early Modern English and asserting “proof” of Book of Mormon

Post by _Lemmie »

You give me an idea. The Interpreter should advertise their peer review as being done by people who absolutely ARE hostile to their LDS truth claims. Can you imagine the marketing opportunity? Of course, they would never publish again.
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Re: Early Modern English and asserting “proof” of Book of Mormon

Post by _Nevo »

Themis wrote:
Sat Aug 22, 2020 9:52 pm
I haven't checked everyone out on that thread, but as far as I can tell Nevo may be the only true scholar there.
Thanks, Themis. I appreciate the compliment. But I'm not actually a scholar, I just play one on the internet ;) I'm actually a technical writer. I washed out of an MA program (twice) in the early 2000s and worked in a mailroom before taking night classes to become a tech writer. Those are my in real life credentials. My only claim to fame is that I was once a Bushman summer fellow.

I have a good deal of sympathy for Robert F. Smith because I know where's he coming from. He went a lot further in his education than I ever did, even studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but ultimately he never earned a graduate degree either. He spent his career working in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. I think, for both us, posting on message boards is our therapy in a way. It is a kind of academic cosplay that lets us indulge our fetish for footnotes and wear our learning as ostentatiously as possible.

Interesting fact about Stanford Carmack: his dad is emeritus general authority Elder John K. Carmack.
Last edited by Anonymous on Sun Aug 23, 2020 11:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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