I think I have found a possible additional issue with the use of the databases over the years in this Early Modern English research. (This is a draft, so I'll clean it up, but I wanted to get the idea out there to see what people think. )
In 2016, Cormack wrote about the phrase "the more part," using EEBO(late 1400s-1700) and Google book search (1700-1830), and also BYU professor Mark Davies COHA data base for a crucial conclusion, as noted in footnotes 5 and 13.
Link to paper, "The more part of the Book of Mormon is Early Modern English" :
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/ ... clnk&gl=us
Here's his conclusion, roughly, regarding the phrase "the more part" in Google books:
Google books yielded approximately 80 hits of “the more part of ” in the modern period,12 but many were duplicates, and the rest were almost all reprints of legal language from the Early Modern era (primarily the 16th century).
...Google books thus verifies the obsolescence of the construction; a modern American attestation is lacking at this time.[footnote] 13 The phrase “the more part of ” appears to have been virtually extinct by the year 1700, barely surviving as legal boilerplate in the British realm.
Footnote 13 reads in total:
13. See note 5
And here is the text leading up to footnote 5:
So we learn that the usage arose no later than the late Middle English period and that it continued into the Early Modern era. Even though most OED quotations occur before the 17th century, the last-dated example in the dictionary is surprisingly late — 1871. This was a conscious, scholarly use by an Oxford historian, Edward Freeman, apparently well-versed in old historical writings such as Holinshed’s Chronicles — heavily used by Shakespeare — which employed many instances of “the more part (of )”.[footnote]5.
And the text of footnote 5.
5. Davies’ Corpus of Historical American English shows the use of the phrase "the more part of" only four times, in a single 1882 book, Hopes and Fears for Art, by an English author who was educated in the classics at Oxford and a devotee of medieval subjects and Chaucer. William Morris, similar to Freeman, would have learned the phraseology by studying earlier writings, and consciously employed it in his book. Mark Davies, The Corpus of Historical American English: 400 million words, 1810–2009 (2010–) [‹ http:/ / corpus.BYU.edu / coha ›].
Carmack's logic is a little convoluted, but as I understand it, in conclusion he is using footnote 5 in support of this:
The phrase “the more part of” appears to have been virtually extinct by the year 1700
Here's the problem. He concluded all Google hits were early modern English reprints, used an EEBO database that ranges up to 1700, and then used Davies' database
which only STARTS in 1810. From that he concludes that the phrase was extinct by 1700, as supported by only related outlier use in 1871 and 1882 with no other appearances, apparently without using the ECCO database, which would have covered that missing century.
By the time he readdresses the term "for the most part" in his 2020 paper, "Pitfalls of the NGram Viewer," he is using ECCO. In it he finds many usages of the phrase from the missing century, but still tweaks the results to fit his hypothesis.
First, he does note, again, how difficult it is to fully search ECCO:
Nevertheless, there is some original use of “the more part of X” in the 1700s. But there is very little, and it is hard to know how much there actually is. We would have to wade through more than 600 instances, using the difficult ECCO interface, in order to find perhaps two or three originals. (ECCO currently gives 624 results, with many duplicates.)
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/ ... clnk&gl=us
Carmack substitutes a similar phrase to compare, and concludes this:
ECCO popularity chart comparing “the more part of them” with “most of them” makes it clear that the latter was the operative phrase in the 18th century, not “the more part of them” (Figure 18). (The usage rate of “the majority of them” was also quite low during this century.) What looks like low-level modern usage of the archaic phrase is, in very large part, just noise emanating from reprinted language.
So even though he now finds persistence of the phrase when using ECCO, he concludes it is "noise." Again, even though better sources showed persistence NOT in support of his Early Modern English hypothesis, he changes the rules of analysis to conclude it really does.
This is only one example, but it doesn't suggest confidence in the methodology used to conclude that the Book of Mormon is Early Modern English.
All I can say is Interpreter's peer review seems to be falling down on the job.
