William Davis' paper in Dialogue evaluates Skousen and Carmack's Early Modern English model

[I Have Questions]

Someone made a lot of money off this silly project. Tom or Dr. Scratch posted the financials a few years ago that showed Skousen received almost $300,000.00 for one year's work on the project. That's insane.

Especially if Marcus remembers correctly and they retracted 70% of what they claimed initially.

[Tom]

Someone made a lot of money off this silly project. Tom or Dr. Scratch posted the financials a few years ago that showed Skousen received almost $300,000.00 for one year's work on the project. That's insane.

It was actually about $329,000 over six years.

viewtopic.php?p=18288#p18288

[Marcus]

Someone made a lot of money off this silly project. Tom or Dr. Scratch posted the financials a few years ago that showed Skousen received almost $300,000.00 for one year's work on the project. That's insane.

Especially if Marcus remembers correctly and they retracted 70% of what they claimed initially.

I was close!! In Feb 2021:

..but just as a reminder, based on the recent retractions published by the Interpreter, here is the count as it currently stands:

Section 1, Archaic Vocabulary: 26 proposed as archaic [out of 41 originally proposed, 37% have been retracted]

Section 3, Archaic Phrases: 14 proposed as archaic [out of 29 originally proposed, 52% have been retracted]

Section 4, Archaic Grammar: 2 proposed as archaic[out of 15 originally proposed, 87% have been retracted]

Section 7, Archaic Expressions: 7 proposed as archaic [out of 37 originally proposed, 81% have been retracted]

For an average retraction of 60% of previously published results, most or all included in the sales of hardcover, expensive publications.

[drumdude]

It’s funny how DCP is completely silent on hard hitting criticisms like this.

But the second after Noel posts a comment on SeN he stops everything he is doing to address it.

[I Have Questions]

It’s funny how DCP is completely silent on hard hitting criticisms like this.

But the second after Noel posts a comment on SeN he stops everything he is doing to address it.

Turkeys don’t promote Thanksgiving

[Tom]

Does anyone know where their project is up to at the moment? Is Interpreter still throwing money at Skousen for this?

I thought they wrapped it up, or at least Skousen announced he was done.

I'm still curious about that $100+ hardcopy that Tom bought, which he then found was superceded by Skousen retracting around 70% of their 'Early Modern English' findings. Was there an addendum issued? Were the bound hard copies replaced?

I haven’t seen an addendum or revised versions. I haven’t received a refund either.

From a more innocent time: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=15&p=107#p107

I am still waiting to see part 8 of volume 3, which should clear up all the faulty information that Doctors Skousen and Carmack unleashed on an unsuspecting Latter-day Saint audience. I’ve been waiting for more than four years. (I understand that their 2020 re-analysis of archaic words, expressions, etc., was revised in 2023, so we may see additional retractions.)

I would note that the offending volumes continue to be sold on the BYU Studies website, without any acknowledgment of the errors. https://byustudies.BYU.edu/product/book ... -of-Mormon

[Physics Guy]

Pinning down when a word or grammatical option finally died out seems like a difficult task. People don’t just all forget something like that completely from one day to the next at some point.

I’m not an expert in language change, but I think I have enough indirect exposure to linguistics, through family connections, to have some feeling for what kinds of hypothesis may be plausible, and what kinds of analysis can be used to test them. And when I think about my own perception of English, I don’t see that I have only one set of correct words and rules.

Instead I seem to recognize a lot of different registers of language. (“Register” is the technical term.) There are expressions that I would never write in a paper, but that I know people say nowadays; things that I’d say at a party but never write in an evaluation. And in particular there are a lot of expressions and constructions that I consider old-fashioned, even very old-fashioned.

Anybody who went through high school in English may remember some Elizabethan English from Shakespeare. Any English major knows that in Chaucer’s day you would say “when that it has happened” instead of “when it has happened”. Archaic language can have an afterlife in memory long past the point when it has fallen out of common use.

I hardly ever use these archaic forms of English. They sound weird, and I can’t count on everyone understanding them. I might use them in a quotation from some old book, or for comic effect, but that’s all. They must be extremely rare in texts that have been published originally within the past hundred years.

Nevertheless I do understand them, with their old-fashioned grammatical rules. I’ve read old books, and heard people quote from old books. If I wanted to write in an archaic style, I could do it—not perfectly, but with plenty of expressions that I bet Carmack and Skousen would count as archaic for the 21st century.

So I don’t think that “archaic” means anything like “forgotten to the point of being impossible for anyone to utter”. The whole premise that archaic language is evidence against 19th-century authorship of the Book of Mormon seems flawed. 19th-century authors would never use those expressions if they were writing in their contemporary register, but a 19th-century author who was deliberately trying to sound archaic could write all those things easily.

And I’m afraid I suspect that the whole Skousen-Carmack project may just be based on a crude bait-and-switch with the term “archaic”. They demonstrate (or try to demonstrate, anyway) that there is all this “archaic language”, but they rely on their non-linguistic audience to think that “archaic” means a lot more than it does.

[I Have Questions]

Pinning down when a word or grammatical option finally died out seems like a difficult task. People don’t just all forget something like that completely from one day to the next at some point.

I’m not an expert in language change, but I think I have enough indirect exposure to linguistics, through family connections, to have some feeling for what kinds of hypothesis may be plausible, and what kinds of analysis can be used to test them. And when I think about my own perception of English, I don’t see that I have only one set of correct words and rules.

Instead I seem to recognize a lot of different registers of language. (“Register” is the technical term.) There are expressions that I would never write in a paper, but that I know people say nowadays; things that I’d say at a party but never write in an evaluation. And in particular there are a lot of expressions and constructions that I consider old-fashioned, even very old-fashioned.

Anybody who went through high school in English may remember some Elizabethan English from Shakespeare. Any English major knows that in Chaucer’s day you would say “when that it has happened” instead of “when it has happened”. Archaic language can have an afterlife in memory long past the point when it has fallen out of common use.

I hardly ever use these archaic forms of English. They sound weird, and I can’t count on everyone understanding them. I might use them in a quotation from some old book, or for comic effect, but that’s all. They must be extremely rare in texts that have been published originally within the past hundred years.

Nevertheless I do understand them, with their old-fashioned grammatical rules. I’ve read old books, and heard people quote from old books. If I wanted to write in an archaic style, I could do it—not perfectly, but with plenty of expressions that I bet Carmack and Skousen would count as archaic for the 21st century.

So I don’t think that “archaic” means anything like “forgotten to the point of being impossible for anyone to utter”. The whole premise that archaic language is evidence against 19th-century authorship of the Book of Mormon seems flawed. 19th-century authors would never use those expressions if they were writing in their contemporary register, but a 19th-century author who was deliberately trying to sound archaic could write all those things easily.

And I’m afraid I suspect that the whole Skousen-Carmack project may just be based on a crude bait-and-switch with the term “archaic”. They demonstrate (or try to demonstrate, anyway) that there is all this “archaic language”, but they rely on their non-linguistic audience to think that “archaic” means a lot more than it does.

As I understand it, they are trying to show that some of the words and phrases used in the Book of Mormon weren’t in use by the society within which Joseph Smith lived, and therefore bolster the claim that it is a translation of an ancient record.

But that premise is fundamentally flawed because they would need to show that not only were those words and phrases not in use by the society within which Joseph Smith lived, BUT ALSO that those words and phrases were not available to Joseph Smith within other literature to which he had access.

I think that if they were to add that criteria to their project, and they really should if they have an interest in being thorough and robust in their thinking, then their already vanishingly small list of “Joseph could not have known” words and phrases would diminish to nothing.

A complete waste of time and money due to being inadequately thought through at the outset.

[Alphus and Omegus]

I think both of you are correct. And the Davis paper also is as well: if there are earlier English phrases in the Book of Mormon, we really couldn't eliminate the hypothesis that they were products of Smith badly aping Elizabethan English.