When I lived in Scotland I was accustomed to code switching - moving between registers according to various criteria, the main criterion being social setting. And I'm sure that pretty much everyone who can speak any language at all performs code switching, whether consciously or not. My father insisted on Queen's English at home, but I'd have been laughed at and teased mercilessly for using it, for example, in the playground at school.Physics Guy wrote: ↑Fri Jul 04, 2025 5:57 amPinning 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.
Just for a little fun, here's an expression you might have heard in the street in my part of the country:
Note: this is English, and nobody who heard it would have any doubt about what you were saying. My daily speech was a bit less extreme than this, but still not easily understood by a non Scot.malkie, in street language, wrote:Uch awa' wi 'ye ya wee nyaff ur a'll pi' the heid oan yi
