So, Carmack assumes that "the credulous" think Smith's Book of Mormon was the outcome of his 'routine pseudo-archaic' efforts. He goes on to define 'routine pseudo-archaism' as being equivalent to the average of 25 published pseudo-archaic texts, a set he picked. He's also indicated at least some of these pseudo-archaic authors were better educated than Smith.Overall, those who entertain secular notions with regard to the Book of Mormon are quite credulous, in a number of ways. They are protected in their credulity by academic priorities.
Here is just one of many ways they are credulous with regard to Book of Mormon English usage.
American English speakers and writers preferred except to save; the Book of Mormon has mostly save, which is a rare thing among texts with large numbers of except.
AmE native speakers employed these two words as prepositions almost all the time; the Book of Mormon as conjunctions almost all the time.
Historically speaking, the conjunction save was used as a coordinator most of the time; in the Book of Mormon, as a subordinator almost all the time.
Conjunctive use was almost always "save that S"; in the Book of Mormon, almost always "save S."
Overall, the Book of Mormon's save usage is unique textually. It is archaic in formation, and very frequently marked for the subjunctive mood, both synthetically and analytically.
For the credulous, Joseph Smith generated the above as a matter of routine pseudo-archaism, even though there is no support for the above Book of Mormon usage among any pseudo-archaic text. (The above is also very different from biblical usage.)
https://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/11 ... 1210269158
In the end, he assumes that unless Smith's works are close to the average of these 25 texts in terms of percent usage of archaisms, he was not trying to be archaic. That's just a bad statistical approach, long before we get to his other assumptions.
