Right on Target!

[_Kishkumen]

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.

I did find a guy named Pablo Gidgiddoni online.

Huh.

[_scorndog]

Is Elizabethan discourse supposed to be a marker of divine authenticity?

No, of course not. That was never asserted. It was something you brought up, maybe because you thought I thought that. But I don't. In some/many cases it is a marker of language that was naturalistically inaccessible for the dictation.

I gather from your response that you think that Smith's dialect had ten or more lexical items that are otherwise unattested in that time period and that the OED declares to have been obsolete long before 1829. You do know that the OED is conservative at declaring obsolescence and archaisms, and that it includes American dialectal items in many of its entries. The likelihood of your approach diminishes as the number items goes up. And lexis is just a small part of the picture. Do you question the OED's pronouncements in quite a few cases because it weakens your viewpoint?

It strikes me that you must assert Smith to be quite a literate fellow in 1829, familiar with Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, etc., or imagine that his dialect maintained dozens of features found in their writings, some of which were archaic by the time they used them. What is your take on the following?

Mosiah 7:1
they wearied him with their teasings

1731 Jonathan Swift
Sir Robert, weary’d by Will Pulteney’s teazings.

Is this a plagiarism by Smith, or was he a literate fellow who had this language as part of his dialect?

[_fetchface]

I did find a guy named Pablo Gidgiddoni online.

Call the apologists! Further evidence that the Book of Mormon is true!

[_Kishkumen]

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.

Hah! Well, I can tell you that someone has already answered this one pretty well. It is called the tenaciousness of archaic forms in vernacular dialects of English.

[_fetchface]

Is this a plagiarism by Smith, or was he a literate fellow who had this language as part of his dialect?

Why does it matter if the archaisms aren't evidence of divine origin?

From studying the life of Joseph Smith, I get the feeling that he was a pretty intelligent person with well above average verbal skills who read and spoke well but didn't particularly like to write. I don't think he is anywhere near the country bumpkin that he is made out to be in Sunday School lessons.

[_Maksutov]

Is this a plagiarism by Smith, or was he a literate fellow who had this language as part of his dialect?

Why does it matter if the archaisms aren't evidence of divine origin?

From studying the life of Joseph Smith, I get the feeling that he was a pretty intelligent person with well above average verbal skills who read and spoke well but didn't particularly like to write. I don't think he is anywhere near the country bumpkin that he is made out to be in Sunday School lessons.

He had sufficient narrative and persuasive gifts not only to amuse his family with wholesale inventions about the Native Americans but enough to induce people to support his peepstone activities. Others could--and would--polish his language once it was in written form.

We can and should be in awe of his literary gifts and his imagination. But that doesn't make his creation any more real or true than The Pilgrim's Progress or The Divine Comedy--or Out On A Limb.

[Guest]

In some/many cases it is a marker of language that was naturalistically inaccessible for the dictation.

Well, that's the crux of the issue, isn't it now? I haven't said Smith was highly educated; I pointed to other text corpora only to show that the definition of what is "naturalistically accessible" is artificially contrived in order to create an apologetic dilemma: these features are either from the KJB or some unnatural source.

But those are not the only options. Why do you shut out that very massive corpus of textual data in order to assume that these features were completely unavailable to Smith? Is it because examining that corpus weakens your viewpoint?

As Kish pointed out, archaisms are a feature of many vernacular varieties of English, so there is a perfectly naturalistic explanation for these archaisms (if that is what they are) that would fit it in just fine with what we know about vernacular dialects.

And you should probably be aware that Spencer's archaisms were probably part of nationalistic rhetorical ploy that was very common at the time: putting odd words found not in great writers but in the "folk" language was one way of advertising his Englishness. The first half of the Faerie Queene, as you know, was published only two years after the failed invasion of the Spanish Armada, and this was a time of nationalistic fervor in England and assertions of English identity in literary production at the time is increasingly well-studied. It is around this same time that Anglo-Saxon literature was rediscovered as part of the search for a decidedly English identity rooted in the English past. This is when the seeds of English philology were planted. As part of that process, there was great interest in recording and preserving words that were part of common people's daily discourse but not part of the literary language. Incorporating these more "archaic" (better: non-literary) features into literary language was one way of increasing that language's Englishness and differentiating it, and that is what Spencer was doing in many cases. It is by no means linguistically unusual that some of these vernacular features would still be around in the early 19th century, especially among the descendants of a group that emigrated from England at this very time. So, ironically, the presence of Spencerian archaisms is probably evidence of the Book of Mormon's persistent vernacularity, not a literariness calling for a supernatural explanation. Andrew Zurcher at Cambridge has written several articles about this. Cf. also the grammatical work of Ben Jonson, which was both a reflection of and response to these tendencies towards vernacularization in the literary language, and see Hannah Crawforth's Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature.

The discovery of archaisms is a worthy discovery; there are several possible naturalistic explanations deserving future research, but they are not evidence of supernatural influence on Joseph Smith, especially when there are plenty of naturalistic explanations that suffice.

The burden is on Skousen to revolutionize the field of linguistics by showing how only an appeal to the supernatural can explain "archaisms" in Joseph Smith's English.

[_Res Ipsa]

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.

No, you are are making it easier to navigate. I can't pretend to follow every twist and turn, but I can at least understand the general terrain, as well as the form of the argument.

I'm glad there are people like you here who have the academic chops to help the rest of us bumble through.

I like your last sentence. Keeping an eye on the big picture is always helpful.

[_Res Ipsa]

The burden is on Skousen to revolutionize the field of linguistics by showing how only an appeal to the supernatural can explain "archaisms" in Joseph Smith's English.

The apologists play lots of games with burden of proof. This is one of their favorites: Here is a parallel (or convergence, or linguistic feature). If you cannot provide specific, compelling evidence that explains it, then I have proven that the only explanation is that Smith was a bona fide prophet.

What they ignore is that the following premise is a necessary part of their argument: "there is no natural explanation for this parallel/convergence/linguistic feature" Because it is a necessary part of their argument, they carry the burden. The tricksy attempt at shifting the burden of proof is illegitimate, and should be called out as such. (As you did here.)

[_scorndog]

Symmachus, examining the corpus doesn't weaken the approach; only if a significant number of obsolete/rare forms are in the corpus close to Smith's time. From what you wrote I conclude that you subscribe to the amazing vernacular theory. Indeed, Smith's vernacular must have been sui generis and unattested. There are 100+ obsolete/rare linguistic forms in the earliest text and Smith spoke everyone of them. We don't see them in VH by E. Smith, who shared Smith's dialect. Interesting. I didn't get your take on Swift since you were apparently interested in discussing Spenser, which I much appreciate. Is that a coincidence of Smith's vernacular with Swift's poetry?