Daniel Peterson wrote:I didn't originate it and I'm not particularly committed to it, but, linguistically and anthropologically, it seems to me relatively plausible. Parallel phenomena occur all the time (e.g., "Lucanian cow," "prairie dog," "sea horse," "buffalo," "turkey," "river horse," etc., etc.), and most of the cackling that I encounter among some critics on this point tells me more about their naïveté than about the "tapir hypothesis."
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As far as I can tell, the "tapir hypothesis" has one critical flaw.
If Nephi saw a tapir (or animal he was unfamiliar with) and gave it a name in his language that meant "horse" (let's say "sus"), then at some point, the word Nephi used ("sus") comes to explain the
new animal, not the old-world "horse". So a translation of these writings would properly translate "sus" to "tapir",
not "horse".
Assuming the plates were kept in a different language than that spoken by the masses, then it would only be a generation or two until Nephi's "sus" was understood to be a tapir.
Thus, the problem isn't that Nephi identified an animal as a "horse" shortly after landfall. The problem is that 500 years later in Alma 18, the record keeper wouldn't be referring to a "horse"; he wouldn't even know what a horse is.
So then we must look at the method of translation, and ask ourselves how is it that the person or entity translating from the language of the plates to English felt that it was proper to take the word in Alma 18 ("sus") and render it as "horse", instead of the animal that was intended by the author, and which was correctly being referred to. Whether it was done by God, the Holy Ghost, Moroni, or another angel or spirit fluent in both Reformed Egyptian and English, the "translator" would know in their knowledge of Reformed Egyptian that "sus" means "tapir".
The Tapir Hypothesis
might have a shred of plausibility if the Book of Mormon were originally written in English, and "horse" were maintained through the centuries as a misnomer for "tapir". But once we introduce an intermediary language with an intelligent (and dare I say, omniscent?) translator, then it becomes a serious, illogical gaffe to suggest Nephi's word still meant "horse" over 5 centuries later.