Royal Skousen and textual criticism

[drumdude]

I will be presenting on the current status of the [Book of Mormon] critical text project at UVU [Utah Valley University] on November 12, 2022, a Saturday, from 7 to 9 p.m. The entire campus is open for parking except the parking garage, which costs $1 an hour.

The location is the Sorenson Center Center Stage. . . . I would like to present on my current work . . . because of the important results I am coming up with as I write parts 7 and 8 of volume 3, the last two printed books in the critical text series. . . .

The title of my presentation will be “Textual Criticism and the Book of Mormon”. . . . I will speak for about an hour and a half, then we’ll have half an hour for questions. . . .

The first part of my presentation will deal with the early transmission of the text and will include what we know about how Joseph Smith translated and how the scribes wrote down his dictation, with evidence not only from witnesses of the translation, but also supporting evidence from the original manuscript itself. Then I will turn to how the text was copied from the original manuscript to the printer’s manuscript (and for one-sixth of it directly to the 1830 edition). My work on this transmission completely overthrows the traditional view of textual critics that a text becomes easier and longer when it is copied. To the contrary, the original manuscript text, when copied, became more difficult and shorter. This finding has huge implications for the theory of textual criticism. Even more important, the Book of Mormon is a long, repetitious text, and this allows us to objectively define what are difficult and easier readings.

In the second part of the presentation, I will discuss conjectural emendations. Textual critics have claimed that their goal is to avoid conjectures, but in actual fact texts have many conjectural emendations, mostly hidden since we do not know the transmission history of most texts. But for the Book of Mormon, we do. And I will be discussing the fact that there are hundreds of conjectural emendations in the current text of the Book of Mormon. Even more surprising is the large number of conjectural emendations in foreign language translations of the Book of Mormon, even when these translations are supervised, so to speak.

And finally, I will be discussing volume 5 of the critical text, which will be released in January. Volume 5 is the computerized collation of the text and it includes every change, not only in words and phrases, but in typos, scribal slips, punctuation, capitalization, versification systems. Only I have had access to this computerized collation, but in January it will become publicly available. And more important, it will be linked to volume 4 of the critical text, Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, so that when users view a particular variant of some significance in the text, they will be able to read what ATV has to say about how the Book of Mormon text should read for that variant. The collation will be presented in a WordCruncher format, thus conveniently allowing users to find all the variants of any given type.

It’s going to be an enlightening evening. I can guarantee that there will be substance in this presentation, not fluff.

Kind of interesting to see LDS apologists use textual criticism as a defense, when textual criticism undermines the LDS interpretation of the Bible so completely. You can't have a literal view of the garden of Eden, of Moses and Abraham being real people, after understanding how the Bible was produced. Yet you're expected to believe in them in the LDS Temple. Not to mention the book of Abraham makes no sense if there was no Abraham.

[DrStakhanovite]

I have to be honest, what Skousen says about textual criticism in those snippets sounds pretty stupid and really out of touch with the actual practice of textual criticism from the last fifty years.

[Doctor Steuss]

My work on this transmission completely overthrows the traditional view of textual critics that a text becomes easier and longer when it is copied. To the contrary, the original manuscript text, when copied, became more difficult and shorter. This finding has huge implications for the theory of textual criticism. Even more important, the Book of Mormon is a long, repetitious text, and this allows us to objectively define what are difficult and easier readings.

Wut?

[DrStakhanovite]

My work on this transmission completely overthrows the traditional view of textual critics that a text becomes easier and longer when it is copied. To the contrary, the original manuscript text, when copied, became more difficult and shorter. This finding has huge implications for the theory of textual criticism. Even more important, the Book of Mormon is a long, repetitious text, and this allows us to objectively define what are difficult and easier readings.

Wut?

lol right? Unpacking how apeshit this all sounds to me would be like a 10,000 word essay.

[Tom]

Perhaps Dr. Skousen should exercise a degree of modesty by avoiding making grandiose claims such as "completely overthrows" and "huge implications." I am reminded of this rather curious episode from almost exactly two years ago.

[Physics Guy]

Royal Skousen is a linguist. From a web page somewhere I once learned that he spent a sabbatical at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, in Nijmegen, shortly after my wife finished her post-doc there. That made me think that my second-hand impressions from chatting with my wife's colleagues there might enable me to get some idea of what kind of linguistics he did, so I looked up one or two of his papers.

They weren't actually close in subject to anything my wife does, so I never got a real expert opinion on them, but going just from my second-hand impression of stuff of this general sort, Skousen's projects seemed kind of weird. My memory of them is also fuzzy now, but as I recall, he was doing things like trying to explain grammatical rules in terms of geometrical distances between words. He was developing models for quantifying such distances.

I liked the general idea, but Skousen seemed to me to be doing it awfully naïvely, expecting very simple models to perform unrealistically well. That just didn't seem like anything else I had heard in linguistics, which in general has always seemed to me to be quite realistic about what kinds of conclusions can be drawn from its available data. The "formalist" school of linguistics, for which Noam Chomsky is the Prophet, can be a bit Platonic, but the "functionalist" school, for which Nijmegen is an important center, is pretty hard-nosed.

So I could easily be wrong, but I have an idea that Royal Skousen might be a bit of an outlier among linguists. Probably not a full-blown crackpot, but not an infielder. His claims to "objectively define ... difficult and easier readings" might be based on some idiosyncratic linguistic theories. He may assert authority about them, and he has real credentials for that, but I'm not sure how many of his peers would really endorse what he says.

[Alphus and Omegus]

Kind of interesting to see LDS apologists use textual criticism as a defense, when textual criticism undermines the LDS interpretation of the Bible so completely. You can't have a literal view of the garden of Eden, of Moses and Abraham being real people, after understanding how the Bible was produced. Yet you're expected to believe in them in the LDS Temple. Not to mention the book of Abraham makes no sense if there was no Abraham.

I will take his argument seriously when he succeeds at publishing an article espousing these arguments about the Book of Mormon in a mainstream linguistics journal.

Which will never happen.

Skousen is like a junior league football player whose parents think he's a star because they've never watched a high school game, let alone a professional one. He's a big fish in a miniscule pond.

[drumdude]

Kind of interesting to see LDS apologists use textual criticism as a defense, when textual criticism undermines the LDS interpretation of the Bible so completely. You can't have a literal view of the garden of Eden, of Moses and Abraham being real people, after understanding how the Bible was produced. Yet you're expected to believe in them in the LDS Temple. Not to mention the book of Abraham makes no sense if there was no Abraham.

I will take his argument seriously when he succeeds at publishing an article espousing these arguments about the Book of Mormon in a mainstream linguistics journal.

Which will never happen.

Skousen is like a junior league football player whose parents think he's a star because they've never watched a high school game, let alone a professional one. He's a big fish in a miniscule pond.

I don’t know much about him. I would assume that like the LDS Egyptologists, they find non-Mormon work to fill the majority of their time so they aren’t only publishing garbage their entire lives.

If this is all he’s ever done that would be incredibly sad.

[Dr Exiled]

Early Modern English is one crazy theory. I'm sad he walked back the ghost committee comments. That's the part I always loved about it. Maybe he could make some references to the ghost committee at his coming presentation and give some red meat to the faithful?