Cinepro Schools MAD on the "Horse-Tapir" Issue

[_Everybody Wang Chung]

Cinepro is completely schooling several MAD posters on whether the word "horse" in the Book of Mormon could actually mean "tapir". It's priceless:

http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/55878-horse-tapir-laughable/

[_Sethbag]

My favorite line so far in that thread is from Jaybear:

To be fair, the only people that laugh, are those that have seen a picture of a tapir.

The German word for sheath or scabbard is Scheide. The German word for vagina is also Scheide.

If I see the German sentence: "Er zog das Schwert aus der Scheide", it would quite incorrect, plain and simple, for me to translate that as "He drew the sword from the vagina."

Why is this incorrect? Because the person who wrote the text was talking about a scabbard, not a vagina. It makes no difference that German uses the same word for things that have different names in English.

Here's another point. Horse does not mean tapir in English. That animal gets its own word in English. So even if the reformed Egyptian character for the Mayan word for tapir was in fact related in some way to the Hebrew word for horse, it is still an incorrect translation to render that character as horse in English. The very process of translation means that one is taking the symbols used in the source language and then choosing words in the the target language that express the same (as close as possible) meaning. If tapir, in reformed EgyptoMayoHebrewish, did in fact appear on the plates, then choosing "horse" to represent that meaning in English is simply not correct.

And, as stated in that thread, cureloms and cumoms stand as proof that God, or his appointed agent, was able to give Joseph Smith translations for things Joseph Smith was unfamiliar with.

[_Sethbag]

Ah, well if I'd read further before posting my reply here I'd have seen that Uncertain used pretty much the same argument I just posted. Sorry to have been redundant.

[Anonymous]

J Green is giving it the good old college try, but unfortunately he's playing for the wrong team. He's saddled with some really stupid apologetics, and having to bend his considerable wits toward defending them.

As a follow-up, using the same translation process as above, why doesn't Joseph Smith also know the real scientific or popular equivalents for curelom and cumom?

J Green, has it occurred to you that this is only even a question to you because you discount the idea that Joseph Smith (or whoever wrote the Book of Mormon) was just making it up?

Once you accept as a possibility that Joseph Smith and his cohorts were making this crap up as they went along, about a zillion different head-scratchers of early Mormon history make perfect sense. Isn't it marvelous?

[_Sethbag]

Zakuska, as ever, is an idiot.

that's the problem we are talking about. If the word Tzimin for example appeared on the plates which can mean either horse or tapir how does that get rendered into what it really means?

1) Joseph Smith didn't know the word tzimin. He wouldn't have known that tzimin was the meaning of a given reformed Egyptian symbol until God or his appointed agent told him so.

Do you really think God is going to say "hey, Joseph, this hen-scratch-looking Egyptian symbol right here is pronounced "tzimin" in Nephite, and it means a short little jungle animal you've never seen before, and they got that word from the old Hebrew word for horse, which they had on the brass plates of Laban. It's your call how you want to translate it, but I'm cool if you just wanna write horse down on your paper."

2) Are you really suggesting that God, or his appointed divine agent, wouldn't know what Nephi et al meant when they engraved the word tzimin onto the plates? Really? Zakuska asks "how does that get rendered into what it really means?" Well, for starters, Joseph Smith puts his face down into his hat, at the bottom of which he has placed his magic rock. God then causes the stone to glow and show Joseph Smith words that represent the translation of the characters on the plates. At some point God reaches the character for tzimin and faces a choice. He makes it.

And you think it's reasonable for that choice that God makes is to tell Joseph that it means horse.

Either Joseph or the divine dictator has to make a choice, or look back in time to know what it really meant. There isn't a one to one translation process going on here.

Yes, that's right. The critics are obviously full of it because they propose something utterly preposterous, which is that God either had to make a choice, or look back in time to figure out, scratching his white beard the whole time no doubt, what the heck Nephi and the other authors of the Book of Mormon were talking about.

[_just me]

That is BRILLIANT!

[_J Green]

Hi, Sethbag.

I've been schooled by Cinepro for years. I'm out the door with daughter in a few minutes, but I promise to answer for my stupidity when I get a chance.

And trust me, I'm routinely answering for my stupidity in one way or another, so I have plenty of practice.

Cheers

[_Quasimodo]

Horse: 5 to 7 feet at the shoulder. Easy to ride (your feet don't drag).

Tapir: 3 feet at the shoulder (rather hog-like). Hard to ride (your feet drag on the ground).

A ridiculous comparison. Llamas might have been a better animal to equate with horses, but they are so delicate that I don't think one could ride one.

[_moksha]

Mayan words for horse before they ever saw a horse? This stands as proof that it is all true. How can this be? The answer is that this Mayan tapir word was part of their oral tradition of naming ancient horses, before these horses all left to set sail at the Grey Havens.

[_hugh jass]

This just proves that Joe Smith really was an uneducated farm boy.

Were there any prevailing theories at the time of Smith about when the horse arrived on this continent?