Folding like Darwin's House of Cards?

[Dr Exiled]

What a crap show. Of course Early Modern English is a dead end theory destined to fail. When it was discovered by friendly critics like Brant Gardner that these supposed archaisms were also in the early "revelations" contained in the D&C and then gradually disappeared in subsequent "revelations," Dr. Carmack and Dr. Skousen should have abandoned ship.

[Philo Sofee]

Confirmation bias at its very best. All one has to do is let the Mopologists refute themselves......

[Physics Guy]

OH man. How are they still holding onto this research?

Lysenkoism.

[Philo Sofee]

OH man. How are they still holding onto this research?

Lysenkoism.

Or TheBookofMormonisatrueandancientbooknomatterwhatism......

[huckelberry]

Many of these archaic usages look plausible to me as mistakes that an uneducated person might make in trying to use the word less archaically. "Desirous" for "desirable", for instance, or "whereby" for "why". People I know occasionally use "whereby" today; I think of "whereby" as the same as "by which", as in "the authority whereby I do this." The meaning of "whereby" in that kind of construction is clearly related to "why".

When a word's meaning changes over time, the change usually begins as a mistake which gets made by so many people that it gradually displaces the formerly correct usage. If the mistake was that easy to make in the first place, because the first and second meanings were so easily confused with each other, then it couldn't be so hard to make the same mistake in reverse, and reproduce the archaic usage by accident later.

Excellent points, Physics Guy. It seems to me that an author seeking to sound archaic has a number of tools to work with, and there is no need to view these devices in the Book of Mormon as anything more than that.

These two comments present a good summary .

I was puzzled about the title of this thread. I had not heard of Darwin having a house of cards nor of that house being an understood analogy. Perhaps in a subculture foreign to me? I tried Google assistance and found a recent book of that name, skeptical of evolution. The bit I read about the book indicated that it presents a collection of id arguments and notes that evolutionist assume that what they don't know about their theory can someday become known.

Whatever angle one takes on that long discussion I find it difficult to relate it to as thin a theory as that the translation of the Book of Mormon was done by early 16th century English speakers.

Should I gather that the theory of 16th, or 15th century translation committee is as uncertain as Darwins theory?

[Physics Guy]

I believe the "folding" in the thread title refers to the folding of that anti-evolutionary book itself.

[Doctor Scratch]

OH man. How are they still holding onto this research?

Well, bear in mind that the Interpreter Foundation has already pumped more than $300,000 dollars into the project. I would imagine that that has something to do with it.

[dastardly stem]

OH man. How are they still holding onto this research?

Well, bear in mind that the Interpreter Foundation has already pumped more than $300,000 dollars into the project. I would imagine that that has something to do with it.

Excellent point. That's it, I'm sure.

[Philo Sofee]

$300,000 into it........wow how many fabulous steak dinners could that have given them? What a colossal waste of time and money.