Brian Stubbs Uto-Aztecan/Egyptian (implying Reformed Egyptian) parallels - Book Review

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Philo Sofee
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Brian Stubbs Uto-Aztecan/Egyptian (implying Reformed Egyptian) parallels - Book Review

Post by Philo Sofee »

https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/vie ... ntext=jbms

In this review all the issues against Brian Stubbs evidence in favor of the Book of Mormon are reviewed and demonstrated that Stubbs is simply whistling in the dark. And, no surprise, true to form, Daniel C. Peterson in his Calgary fireside on Thursday night Zoom ignores this review and implies Stubbs work is stellar (it isn't by any stretch of the imagination according to this reviewer, a Phd in linguistics) and therefore there is hope that really solid evidence of Middle Eastern language influence is valid evidence for the Book of Mormon (it isn't and it never will be either).
This review is a powerful antidote to Mormon apologetics using linguistic evidences for the Book of Mormon language in Mesoamerica, especially potential Egyptian connections. There are none, to be sure, but apologists love to present Stubbs as a very credible and powerful tool to enhance Book of Mormon authenticity. This review is a sober reminder that we cannot trust apologists who only read one sidedly and present information in a skewed and fatally flawed manner as Daniel C. Peterson does, which is so unfortunate for his credibility. But he makes his bed, he now gets to sleep in it.
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Re: Brian Stubbs Uto-Aztecan/Egyptian (implying Reformed Egyptian) parallels - Book Review

Post by Moksha »

And, no surprise, true to form, Daniel C. Peterson in his Calgary fireside on Thursday night Zoom ignores this review and implies Stubbs's work is stellar...
Do we know if Dr. Peterson was aware of this? Is there any reason to think he has kept up on any reading or research since his retirement? Continual vacationing and posting on his blog take a lot of time.

He probably gave that fireside off-the-cuff. There was no need to do Consiglieri-like preparation since it was incidental to his seeing the Calgary Stampede. They had bulls that FAIR can only aspire to.
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Re: Brian Stubbs Uto-Aztecan/Egyptian (implying Reformed Egyptian) parallels - Book Review

Post by hauslern »

Peterson reads this board
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... tment.html

"I notice that a few folks on the Peterson Obsession Board have taken aim at the fireside that I presented in Calgary on Thursday night. A couple of them watched it online via Zoom because . . . well, because, to a remarkably weird degree, their lives seem to revolve around Me. One of them, in particular, has taken aim at my relatively brief allusion to the work of Brian Stubbs, a respected authority on the lexicography of the Uto-Aztecan language family in the New World. You may or may not recall Brother Stubbs’s contention that the vocabulary of Uto-Aztecan appears to have been significantly influenced in ancient times by contact with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Egyptian. Even if accepted, this proposition would not, as such, be direct evidence for the Book of Mormon. But there’s no question that — again, if accepted — it would greatly enhance the Book of Mormon’s credibility."
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Re: Brian Stubbs Uto-Aztecan/Egyptian (implying Reformed Egyptian) parallels - Book Review

Post by Philo Sofee »

:lol:
Thanks Hauslern!
Yeah there's no direct evidence here at all. But if it is accepted then it really would help out the Book of Mormon credibility!
In other words, Stubb's work is useless, why even bring it up? Oh, because it could... it could be something! I mean hey it really COULD be something!!! :lol: :lol: :lol:
Such is the low bar level of apologetics evidences for their scriptures. They just shoot in the dark with anything no matter how invalid, far away, or impossible.
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Re: Brian Stubbs Uto-Aztecan/Egyptian (implying Reformed Egyptian) parallels - Book Review

Post by drumdude »

Looks like Peterson is admitting that no non-Mormon scholar is taking the claims seriously.

So what he said during the fireside was another flagrant lie.

If LDS scholars are so trustworthy on this, why did he feel the need to mention non-LDS scholars’ opinions at all? Because he knows LDS scholars will write anything to defend the church, and they aren’t convincing due to their bias and history of shoddy academic practices.
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Re: Brian Stubbs Uto-Aztecan/Egyptian (implying Reformed Egyptian) parallels - Book Review

Post by Gadianton »

DCP wrote: a respected authority on the lexicography of the Uto-Aztecan language family in the New World. You may or may not recall Brother Stubbs’s contention that the vocabulary of Uto-Aztecan appears to have been significantly influenced in ancient times by contact with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Egyptian. Even if accepted
DCP doesn't have a single example of a non-Mormon scholar who finds Stubbs' research compelling. Neither does Brian, Brian has said he's received positive feedback in private correspondence. That could mean just about anything, almost certainly it means they're just being polite and don't want to go there.

Carmack recently got a linguistics paper about the Book of Mormon published in a linguistics journal, if I recall? Since as Dan points out, "even if accepted" Stubbs work is a far cry from establishing the Book of Mormon in the least bit, which is absolutely true (although the firesides would be "how could he have known!!! from start to finish), then the academic community must not be as biased as DCP fantasizes, and there's no reason Brian can't get get a paper published somewhere respectable; given he's a respected world authority (with a masters (Benjamin Whorf didn't have a Phd either!!)) and all, and he's receiving a ton of positive feedback from possible peer reviewers in private already.
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Re: Brian Stubbs Uto-Aztecan/Egyptian (implying Reformed Egyptian) parallels - Book Review

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It is problematic because there is no accepted method for demonstrating borrowing or contact induced changes, and consequently no method for falsifying them. Systematic sound laws do not apply in the transfer of elements of one language to another, a language may borrow many words or few and change them in fairly random ways as they are adapted to the borrowing language's phonology, and there really is no good way to disprove a claim about a form in one prehistoric language being borrowed from another. This is why linguists normally would never even entertain the idea of a scenario of borrowing, unless there is independent evidence suggesting probable historical contact between the two languages. In this, case there is exactly zero independent evidence of contact between Ancient Semites or Egyptians and Uto-Aztecans…except for the Book of Mormon.

So by presenting his hypothesis as a claim of ancient contact and language mixture, Stubbs is in fact making a claim that cannot be methodically falsified. When working outside of historical disciplines, such a claim is usually called pseudoscientific, but in a historical discipline such as this, we can only strive to classify it either as convincing or unconvincing given the presented evidence.
http://nahuatlstudies.blogspot.com/2019 ... n.html?m=1
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Re: Brian Stubbs Uto-Aztecan/Egyptian (implying Reformed Egyptian) parallels - Book Review

Post by Gadianton »

That's the same core complaint of Symmachus.

Sound rules are (in my paraphrase) the "law of nature" as it were, how speaking deteriorates over time, borrowings are the exception to the rule. Borrowing is a diagnosis of exclusion.

His apologists have tried to find ways out from this bind, there have been "rule based" borrowing examples, but Symmachus punctures the suggestions easily.

Well, DCP isn't going to put the effort into understanding it. That's not because he's dumb, it's because he's smart. He must strongly suspect nothing in apologetics is going in his direction, and there's more bang for the buck in meta-discussions. So-and-so received a Phd and has published on this or other subjects or the exact opposite, experts are often wrong, Mendel was overlooked, science just discovered this new thing. So-and-so just wen on a trip to Europe, so he must be a man of culture. He's not going to learn the material and go and get embarrassed by a Symmachus out there, better to just be a promoter. That's what works best for his side anyway. All the people with Nibley books on their shelves they never read, securing themselves that if somebody out there really smart believes it, then they are justified to do so also.
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Re: Brian Stubbs Uto-Aztecan/Egyptian (implying Reformed Egyptian) parallels - Book Review

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

This is an excellent read. Anyone interested in tucking this feather in their cap for reference or sharing needs to bookmark it (and read it, of course).

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Hugh Nibley claimed he bumped into Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanoff. Dishonesty is baked into Mormonism.
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Re: Brian Stubbs Uto-Aztecan/Egyptian (implying Reformed Egyptian) parallels - Book Review

Post by Philo Sofee »

drumdude wrote:
Sun Jul 17, 2022 2:40 pm
It is problematic because there is no accepted method for demonstrating borrowing or contact induced changes, and consequently no method for falsifying them. Systematic sound laws do not apply in the transfer of elements of one language to another, a language may borrow many words or few and change them in fairly random ways as they are adapted to the borrowing language's phonology, and there really is no good way to disprove a claim about a form in one prehistoric language being borrowed from another. This is why linguists normally would never even entertain the idea of a scenario of borrowing, unless there is independent evidence suggesting probable historical contact between the two languages. In this, case there is exactly zero independent evidence of contact between Ancient Semites or Egyptians and Uto-Aztecans…except for the Book of Mormon.

So by presenting his hypothesis as a claim of ancient contact and language mixture, Stubbs is in fact making a claim that cannot be methodically falsified. When working outside of historical disciplines, such a claim is usually called pseudoscientific, but in a historical discipline such as this, we can only strive to classify it either as convincing or unconvincing given the presented evidence.
http://nahuatlstudies.blogspot.com/2019 ... n.html?m=1
Hats off to Drumdude here! What a terrific review from a NON-LDS actual real scholar in the Nahuatl language to check into Stubbs use of tools to find parallels between the Mesoamerican languages and Old World languages!!!

This gentleman's conclusion is so opposite of what Dr. Peterson has noted (as a non-expert in any of this, but only as a professional apologist), that I have to wonder if this is the same Brian Stubbs! And he does note the other two LDS reviewers of Stubbs and since they were publishing in LDS venues, their biases got the better of them. No wonder Peterson only goes with them in his fireside - lol.
Conclusions: It’s a no from me

For all these reasons, I find the proposal to be very far from convincing. It seems to me that here, Stubbs is not at all doing the kind of careful comparative work that he is known for. The handling of Nahuatl data is highly problematic, with massaged translations that make words that have virtually no semantic link falsely appear to have the same meanings, with apparently selective failure to pay attention to segmentation and morphological analysis in the Nahuatl, and inattention to other possible and plausible explanations even those found in his own previous work.

I should note, that since many of the reconstructions of proto-Corachol and proto-Corachol Nahuatl are my own and most of them yet unpublished, Stubbs cannot of course be faulted for not knowing or accepting them. But if anyone in the world would be equipped with enough knowledge to investigate the history of these forms in Nahuatl on their own, it is Brian Stubbs. And really, it don't seem that he has even tried to look into the immediate history of any of the Nahuatl terms he cites. He has just assumed that it was conservative. Investigating alternative explanations of one's data is of course a basic part of establishing a hypothesis in a rigorous manner.

I am not equipped to evaluate Stubbs’ usage of the data from many of the other United Airlines languages, nor the Semitic or Egyptian, but given how the Nahuatl is treated, it cannot simply be assumed that it is being handled well. I pass the baton to the next scholars to check how he handles the languages of their expertise, both Uto-Aztecan and Afro-Asiatic.

J. S. Gould also showed us that we all as scholars are prone to the error of confirmation bias. Dearly held beliefs, whether religious, political or theoretical, are likely to color our interpretation of data and dull our critical sense about our own conclusions. I think as a discipline, historical linguistics, because it relies on our ability to see intricate patterns that others have not yet seen, is more prone to being influenced by our biases in interpretations than most other kinds of science. Really, I think historical linguistics is perhaps more of an art, though an art that should be approached with a scientific mindset. This proneness to confirmation bias of course no less affects me as an non-theist scholar with a distinct set of ideas about what happened in prehistoric Mesoamerica, than it does people of other diverse persuasions and ideas. But this is why these kinds of scholarly endeavors have to stand and fall on the evaluation of empirical data by people with different biases: we are all entitled to our interpretations, but no one is entitled to their own facts.

What would be needed for a proposal like this to be convincing to me? First of all the question is, how much will be left once experts in different other languages involved weed out the infelicitous examples as I have done here. This sample suggests that quite little would be left after such a pass-through. But the next version of this proposal should also take some steps to remedy the basic methodological flaws:

I would very much prefer non-linguistic (that is archaeological or genetic) corroboration of ancient trans-atlantic contact before I would entertain the hypothesis of contact between Uto-Aztecan and ancient Afroasiatic languages as a reasonable explanation of likenesses between the languages.
I would want a much more thorough description of the proposed borrowings, including vowels. Uto-Aztecans would have heard the semitic words with vowels, and borrowed them with vowels. So it is simply not possible to simply ignore the vowels as Stubbs does (exept when he finds one that accidentally fits). I would expect systematic vowel patterns for verbs, nouns etc. Also forms with partial matches, where only two of three consonants match, cannot be allowed.
I would want attention paid to chronology. When did the supposed borrowings take place? Already before proto-Uto-Aztecan? In that case all proposed borrowings must be reconstructible to PUA and to which ever layer of Afro-Asiatic or Semitic one believes was spoken at that period. It is not reasonable to cherry pick forms from the individual daughter languages and claim that they are retentions when the may as well be innovations (such retentions can only be posited after the relationship is established).

As Chris Rogers’ points out a convincing proposal would in fact have much fewer correspondence pairs, of much higher quality, and preferably, they would be paradigmatically related. For example, what is closest to appear convincing for example is the pronominal forms, where the n, t- y- pattern looks highly intriguing (until you remember that the first person n- is pan-American and realize the y- doesn’t fit).

One thing that makes me uncomfortable is the fact that Stubbs worked on this simultaneously with working on his catalogue of Uto-Aztecan reconstructions. I cannot help but worry that the reconstructions of United Airlines forms there, may be subtly compromised by Stubbs unconsciously trying to make them fit with his Semitic data. I will have to use it with a degree of apprehension in the future.
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