SteelHead wrote:Well the implications section.... when the answer is "magic", we can make the implications anything. How bout-> hence we deduce that true adamic, the language spoken by God himself, is 16th century english, as evidenced by its use in the Book of Mormon.
What would have impressed me would be a someone advancing a hypothesis before study was done that the Adamic language was in fact 16th Century English, with a some explanation for why we should expect it to be true.
I agree, "magic" can be invoked to "explain" any set of facts.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
A dear friend informed me today that Skousen actually had a one-day conference on this archaic English business. Evidently, it has become a whole new sub-field in Mopologetics. The Interpreter has already published one of the papers from the conference! Where have I been?
I still wonder what possible apologetic value this could have. What about the supposedly miraculous ability to translate like a man living in Elizabethan England would tend to support Mormon claims or make them appear more attractive?
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist
Kishkumen wrote:A dear friend informed me today that Skousen actually had a one-day conference on this archaic English business. Evidently, it has become a whole new sub-field in Mopologetics. The Interpreter has already published one of the papers from the conference! Where have I been?
Perhaps you are referring to the special Interpreter conference in March. In April, my family watched videos of the conference presentations for four consecutive family nights (we ended each night's viewing by munching on either decadent homemade mint chocolate chip brownies or yummy rhubarb peach cobbler). All agreed that we were very well fed those four evenings--both physically and spiritually. I could not help thinking of the memorable evening some years ago in which we feasted on the words of Peter Novick (i.e., we listened to Novick's 1989 SLC Symposium address, "Why the Old Mormon Historians Are More Objective Than the New").
Last edited by Guest on Sat Jun 20, 2015 2:20 am, edited 2 times in total.
“A scholar said he could not read the Book of Mormon, so we shouldn’t be shocked that scholars say the papyri don’t translate and/or relate to the Book of Abraham. Doesn’t change anything. It’s ancient and historical.” ~ Hanna Seariac
Tom wrote:Perhaps you are referring to the special Interpreter conference in March. In April, my family watched videos of the conference presentations for four consecutive family nights (we ended each night's viewing by munching on either decadent homemade mint chocolate chip brownies or yummy rhubarb peach cobbler). All agreed that we were very well fed those four evenings--both physically and spiritually. I could not help thinking of the memorable evening some years ago in which we feasted on the words of Peter Novick (i.e., we listened to Novick's 1989 SLC Symposium address, "Why the Old Mormon Historians Are More Objective Than the New").
The ghosts of John Dee and Edward Kelley must have buoyed your spirits.
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist
... the high fives continue at the Interpreter Lounge.
Actually, what is going on is Gerbiling. Making low sonorous sounds interspersed will high trilling notes and accompanied by whole body undulations and vibrating. No one is certain whether the first apologetic gerbiling was spontaneous or learned behavior from an external source.
Agreed it is a spectacular thread! Thanks for the bump.
Thank you, Dr Moore, for finding this and posting it here. Since I can't edit it, perhaps I shall write a slightly adjusted version and repost, as some of the characters are not appearing properly, which makes the argument very difficult to follow. I notice that the Book of Mormon onomasticon does not contain this etymology in its entry on Gidgiddoni. I wonder whether it will appear in their new book.
I wonder what happened to scorndog. They seem to have had some understanding of the issues, but to be walking past the main issue with averted eyes. Nobody today would say "forsooth" in any natural register: the word is archaic. Most English speakers do still know "forsooth" as an archaic word, however, and could easily use it if they were deliberately trying to sound Shakespearian. Similarly, "but if" meaning "unless" may well have been archaic since 1600 or whatever, but the question is not whether Joseph Smith would have used the expression in a job interview. It's whether he would have used it in a deliberate attempt to sound old-fashioned.
Even if Smith would never have thought of saying "but if" in his natural speech, he could easily have known "but if" as an old-fashioned turn of speech that might sound good in his fake-Biblical scripture. This is especially true because "but if" is not a special two-word idiom that only makes sense as a whole. It's a simple construction of "but", meaning "except", and "if", meaning "in the case that". Even long after people had abandoned "but if" in favour of "unless" to express "except in the case that", the construction makes sense to anyone who knows "but" as "except" and "if" for "in the case that". And both of those usages are still alive today: I'll have everything but onions on my Whopper, if you're buying.
Linguists have done a lot to show that our grammatical patterns in ordinary speech are unconscious and instinctive. If you're trying to speak naturally, you quite unconsciously avoid saying things that nobody around you ever says. So you wouldn't normally say "but if" to mean "except in the case that", even if you would occasionally say "but" for "except" and "if" for "in the case that". You don't have to think about it.
That does not mean, however—by no means whatever does it mean in the slightest—that humans are neurologically incapable of deliberately speaking in non-standard ways. On the contrary, it is quite easy to put on a fake manner of speech. It's just clumsy, in comparison to natural speech. If you deliberately use a non-standard register, you lose that unconscious avoidance of non-standard phrasing, in kind of the way you lose depth perception if you walk around with one eye closed. You say things that would make sense, as far as you can tell, even though nobody around you would ever say them. So you put together words in non-standard ways.
You know that old-fashioned language used "but" for "except" a lot more often than modern speech uses it. You know that old-fashioned language used "if" for "in the case that" commonly, too. So, lacking the unconscious eloquence of natural speaking, you sometimes string "but" and "if" together to express "except in the case that", even though people had stopped saying "but if" that way naturally long before your target old-fashioned era.
