Right on Target!

[_Symmachus]

Half a minute. Surely the Nephites spoke (and wrote) a semitic language? Hence no indications of vowels, one would expect; the Nephites lost contact with their ancestral culture - and indeed were already extinct as a people - well before the Masoretes introduced the vowel pointing we have today.

So where did Smith get his vowels from?

Well, Hebrew and other Semitic languages generally don't express short vowels in consonantal writing, but long vowels are frequently written, even in inscriptions. The Canaanite vowel shift affects long vowels only, so if the Canaanite vowel shift were responsible for the "o" in Gidgiddoni from Akk. Gidgiddanu, and if the Nephites followed Hebrew orthographic practices, and if Joseph Smith's scribe's transliteration accurately reflected Nephite phonology (a lot of "ifs"), then it's possible we would have some evidence of an ancient linguistic phenomenon in the text, unknown to Joseph Smith, thus providing another bull's eye. The Canaanite is a regular and predictable sound change, and thus the model in which Book of Mormon is what apologists claim would be a model with predictive power.

Problem is, there is no way this is from the Canaanite vowel shift. Even if you found a few examples showing that Akk. long "a" can show up as long "o" in Hebrew, all you'd be doing is showing that borrowing did not follow regular, predictive phonological patterns, since there are plenty of counter examples. And if that is so, then you're just back to the kind of impressionistic methodology described by Kishkumen: it looks so close, so it must be it. The only confirmation would be your preexisting bias.

And then of course how do we know it's not a coincidence? By establishing systematicity. But a single example in the Book of Mormon does not do that, so back to impressionistic reading of the evidence confirmed by bias.

If apologists are gonna claim linguistics his "hard, verifiable evidence," then they should live with the consequences of that.

[_Symmachus]

Interesting observation. That leads to a question about old English meanings that are in the text that Skousen has pointed out.

What exactly is the question that this leads to?

[_Symmachus]

Aw, c'mon. Petey Gidgiddoni lived down the street from me in Trenton. So it's Italian. So I think this really comes around to Tiro the Nephite. Easy peasy.

Yeah, that's pretty much how apologetic "linguistics" work.

Questioner: "What about Gidgiddoni, NHM, and Alma?"

Apologist: "Don' warry 'bad it; I took care a-dat."








Questioner: "But..."

Apologist: "I said don' warry 'bad it!!"

[_Maksutov]

Aw, c'mon. Petey Gidgiddoni lived down the street from me in Trenton. So it's Italian. So I think this really comes around to Tiro the Nephite. Easy peasy.

Yeah, that's pretty much how apologetic "linguistics" work.

Questioner: "What about Gidgiddoni, NHM, and Alma?"

Apologist: "Don' warry 'bad it; I took care a-dat."








Questioner: "But..."

Apologist: "I said don' warry 'bad it!!"

[_scorndog]

As you correctly point out, Symmachus, an English linguistic treatment is not speculative in the way that a treatment of a posited underlying language is. So, turning our attention to the English, how to account for extrabiblical obsolete meaning in the English-language earliest text, as Skousen has pointed out?

[_Symmachus]

As you correctly point out, Symmachus, an English linguistic treatment is not speculative in the way that a treatment of a posited underlying language is. So, turning our attention to the English, how to account for extrabiblical obsolete meaning in the English-language earliest text, as Skousen has pointed out?

For example?

[_scorndog]

I had thought you were aware of some of these, Symmachus, given your linguistic expertise. But perhaps you are not familiar with them. Have you neglected the Germanic branch of Indo-European? Probably not. You seem to be a thoroughgoing scholar, a true philologist. Here is an example that Skousen pointed out some time ago, edited out for the 1920 version:

Mosiah 3:19
the natural man is an enemy to God and has been from the fall of Adam and will be forever and ever but if he yieldeth to the enticings of the Holy Spirit and putteth off the natural man

The last OED quotation for "but if" = 'unless' is dated 1596 (Edmund Spenser, who was known to favor archaisms). Not in the KJB.

[_Res Ipsa]

Thanks for this Symmachus. These linguistic arguments are tough for us unwashed masses to navigate. Which I suppose is the point.

[Guest]

Here is an example that Skousen pointed out some time ago, edited out for the 1920 version:

Mosiah 3:19
the natural man is an enemy to God and has been from the fall of Adam and will be forever and ever but if he yieldeth to the enticings of the Holy Spirit and putteth off the natural man

The last OED quotation for "but if" = 'unless' is dated 1596 (Edmund Spenser, who was known to favor archaisms). Not in the KJB.

I guess I just don't see what the point of these is, at least from the perspective of apologetic arguments. If it is evidence of anything, then it is evidence of the speech patterns of early 19th century English speakers on the margins of New England. That's interesting, but I don't see how that helps the apoloetics of the Book of Mormon.

So let's say it is an archaism: well, all that shows is that Joseph Smith's dialect preserved an archaism. That is not usual; in any given language, certain dialects will innovate where others will preserve linguistic features and these are archaisms only from the perspective of the innovating dialects. But how does establishing a 16th century archaism help the apologist case? Is Elizabethan discourse supposed to be a marker of divine authenticity?

Besides, the assumption seems to be that, if it's not in the KJB, then Joseph Smith could not have been exposed to it. I think that's ludicrous; Joseph Smith's family were from puritan Massachusetts, so, has Skousen examined, say Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) for these archaisms? What about William Bradford's Of Plimouth [sic] Plantation of 1652? Or the large corpus of puritan sermons and treatises like, say, those of Jonathan Edwards? These were widely circulating texts in New England and still part of the educational curriculum in the United States up until the mid-twentieth century. Then there is the archaizing poetry of Edward Taylor, Anne Bradstreet, etc., as well as countless diaries to examine.

There is a vast amount of early American writing that established its norms and patterns in the very period in which these "archaisms" were still part of the written language, so Skousen should eliminate the possibility if he is trying to say the Book of Mormon is unique. In fact, has Skousen filtered out the records (sermons, treatises, etc.) of the religious discourse of the early 19th century to which Joseph Smith would have been exposed? Then of course there is the problem of Milton and Shakespeare, who were also not unknown in 19th century America, to put it mildly. Have they been eliminated from consideration?

There is a lot of material you have to go through before you can assume Book of Mormon features are unique; a corpus search of the KJB or a look at an entry in the OED is not very meaningful.

If the Book of Mormon is unique, I would think the next step would be to look at other speakers from the area and time period, but of course the problem is that our records are written, not spoken, and because the standards of written language comes through a process of education, there is always a tendency to impose the standards of the socially dominant dialect onto all the others. So it possible too that most of the contemporary data that could be used as comparison to the Book of Mormon are not helpful, since those archaisms—if they were present in the speech of Joseph Smith's neighbors—would have been weeded out in the process of writing.

The Book of Mormon is an interesting case because it is basically an oral text (the implications of this are huge and as yet untapped) at its inception, but, as your example shows, it is has been gradually textualized and brought into conformity with the standards of written language.

And then even if you establish that the Book of Mormon is unique, the only thing you will have really established is that Joseph Smith's dialect preserved some archaisms, but, as I said, that is not an apologetic breakthrough, however it is interesting it might to historical linguists.

[_Symmachus]

Thanks for this Symmachus. These linguistic arguments are tough for us unwashed masses to navigate. Which I suppose is the point.

I appreciate that, Brad. I do hope I am not making it harder to navigate; the apologists' linguistic arguments tend to rest on baseless assumptions and it is sometimes hard to expose that without using technical jargon, but I try to explain the jargon and hope my reasoning is clear enough to follow. If not, then any confusion that results is because of a fault in my writing style.

Any equation of surface similarities between Book of Mormon Gidgiddoni/Alma/Nahom and Gid-gid-da-a-nu/3alma'/NHM is a subjective choice rooted in one's preexisting attitude towards literalist claims. I wish they had the honesty to admit that and just shout "faith!" or something, instead of dressing up their choice in technical language as if doing so constituted objective evidence.

At the end of the day, any apologist's argument, no matter how technical the jargon, is ultimately in the service of a a claim that an unlettered farmer in rural New York in the early 19th century dug up some book in his backyard written on gold that he heard about from an angel one summer night.