William Davis' paper in Dialogue evaluates Skousen and Carmack's Early Modern English model

[Everybody Wang Chung]

It's troubling that the Interpreter Foundation paid over $500,000 for this project and subsequently a very large percentage of the project's findings have turned out to be incorrect. As far as I know, the book is still for sale without any correction notice or any attempt by the Interpreter Foundation to retract the publication.

What is the ethical thing for the Interpreter Foundation to do in a situation like this? Hopefully, our resident academics can shed some light.


A.I. has this to say:

If an academic author discovers that their published book contains false results, the ethical course of action is to promptly inform the publisher and take steps to correct the record. This typically involves issuing a correction notice or, in cases of serious errors, retracting the publication.
Here's a more detailed breakdown:

1. Notify the Publisher:
The first step is to contact the journal editor or book publisher to inform them of the error.
Provide them with detailed information about the error and its potential impact on the published work.
2. Determine the Appropriate Action:
Correction Notice:

If the error is minor and doesn't fundamentally undermine the main findings, a correction notice (erratum or corrigendum) may be sufficient.
Retraction:

If the error is serious, affects the core findings, or is due to misconduct, a retraction of the publication may be necessary.

3. Transparency and Honesty:
Be transparent about the error and its implications.
Avoid attempting to cover up the mistake or downplaying its significance.
4. Collaboration and Communication:
Work with the publisher to determine the best course of action and to ensure a clear and accurate record is maintained.
Be prepared to collaborate with the publisher on drafting the correction notice or retraction statement.
5. Learning from the Experience:
Use the situation as a learning opportunity to improve future research practices.
Reflect on the reasons for the error and take steps to prevent similar mistakes in future work.
In essence, the ethical responsibility is to be forthcoming about the error, work with the publisher to correct the record, and strive to maintain the integrity of the academic literature.

[PseudoPaul]

Last I heard, Skousen and Carmack's theory had never been published in a proper academic journal. That's a lot of money just to publish a kooky theory to the Mormon Vanity Press-o-sphere.

[sock puppet]

There is a fascinating new paper from William Davis, published in the Dialogue, that comments on the Early Modern English theory, among other things.

I am reading the paper now, but here is the conclusion to give a taste:

Joseph Smith's Spiritual Language: The Presence of Early Modern English in the Book of Mormon

2025, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought

----
Conclusion
While this essay does not provide a comprehensive survey of every textual phenomenon that Skousen and Carmack employ to assert their theory of “tight control,” the information presented here nevertheless offers more than sufficient evidence to demonstrate that Joseph Smith’s participation in the translation work was far more involved than a simple process of transmitting a preexisting, pretranslated work to his scribes.

Rather, the English-language text of the Book of Mormon points ineluctably to Joseph himself as the source of the English rendition.
The textual characteristics reveal much about the translator: The language came from a fallible source—specifically, a translator who was a non-native speaker of Early Modern English, despite adopting some of its characteristics; a translator who did not have perfect command of the specific meanings of all the words being used (or occasionally misspoke and used similar but incorrect words); and a translator prone to human error, especially when adapting KJV structures and patterns to new forms and contexts. The attribution of such idiosyncratic meanings and defective constructions to God, his angels, his sacred instruments, or some other divine agent results in a strained and implausible position to maintain.

By restoring Joseph Smith to the power, function, and title of being an actual translator, we enhance our understanding of the nature of his revelations. In doing so, we also clarify the message and meaning of the Book of Mormon. As one of the many possible insights that such a view would bring, there is perhaps no greater opportunity than recovering the final intentions for the text of the Book of Mormon. In this important and consequential regard, the 1840 third edition of the Book of Mormon—the last edition that Joseph Smith personally edited and corrected—would assume authoritative status over the earlier versions. Royal Skousen’s work to recover the earliest (spoken) version of the text would then prove invaluable as a means to observe the original expression of the ideas, but it would be the 1840 revision of the work that would provide the foundational text for analysis to determine authoritative readings. Understanding the nature of the text as being the product of Joseph Smith’s “loose control” translation thereby provides a crucial and essential foundation for future explorations of the Book of Mormon.

https://www.academia.edu/130179615/Jose ... load-paper

[bolding added by me.]

Say it ain't so, Joe. English words appeared above the stone in the hat. Nothing to translate there.

[malkie]

There is a fascinating new paper from William Davis, published in the Dialogue, that comments on the Early Modern English theory, among other things.

I am reading the paper now, but here is the conclusion to give a taste:


[bolding added by me.]

Say it ain't so, Joe. English words appeared above the stone in the hat. Nothing to translate there.

Especially in the "one word at a time, verified before you can continue" mode that has been described.

[Tom]

Davis’s paper is also accessible in HTML and PDF here (no registration needed): https://www.dialoguejournal.com/article ... of-Mormon/

[Marcus]

Davis’s paper is also accessible in HTML and PDF here (no registration needed): https://www.dialoguejournal.com/article ... of-Mormon/

Thank you, Tom!!!!

[Marcus]

Davis' paper is critical of Skousen's and Carmack's conclusions, but his concerns about Carmack's methodology, which in my opinion is a far harsher critique, are politely relegated to the footnotes.

Whether or not one chooses to believe that Joseph Smith read any of Bunyan’s stories, the writings themselves were certainly widely accessible and could easily have provided a wide range of templates for many of the Book of Mormon forms.[70]

Mild. But the footnote? Wow.

[ftnote 70] This accessibility of archaic forms speaks to the issue of influence and comparative analysis. Carmack frequently dismisses texts as possible sources of influence based on differing rates of usage from one text to another, but this is a systemic flaw in his analyses.

It is a faulty assumption to argue that two texts must share a similar profile for a given feature in order for one to qualify as a possible source of influence for the other.

Carmack notes, for example, that the periphrastic did rate in the KJV is 1.7 percent, while the Book of Mormon rate is 27.2 percent, prompting him to argue that “the occasional intersection” of KJV and Book of Mormon periphrastic did syntax argues against the KJV as a source of influence: “The rates and patterns of use strongly indicate independence” (Carmack, “Implications of Past-Tense Syntax,” 123, table 2).

This reasoning, however, rests on the faulty premise that the human mind processes language in empirically predictable ways. Yet, the mind does not read a text, isolate a particular feature, calculate the frequency of usage, and then attempt to reproduce that same frequency in a new composition. Rather, the mind is unpredictable, focusing on different linguistic elements and making use of language features in idiosyncratic ways. An individual, for instance, could encounter the unfamiliar periphrastic do in a work, and then, struck by the novelty of the form, latch onto it and use it at a much higher rate of frequency than the source text expresses. These differences would not disqualify the original text from being a source of inspiration. Though the rate of periphrastic did in the KJV is 1.7 percent, this percentage refers to 515 instances of the form (as Carmack indicates in table 2), which would provide an ample resource to observe and mimic.

Grant Hardy raises the same concern: “It seems to me, however, that Carmack does not give adequate consideration to alternative hypotheses: for instance, Joseph may have picked up the do-auxiliary from the King James Bible and then overused it in an idiosyncratic way.” Hardy, Approaching Completion, 15n17.

[spacing added to facilitate reading]

[Physics Guy]

If you have two extensive corpuses of independently produced texts, then I expect that a big difference in frequencies of use of a structure can indeed be one of the things that makes you say they are different dialects. Davis’s point sounds perfectly right, though. I really don’t see how one can conclude, just from the use frequency difference, that one text was not an influence on the other.

I say, “Don’t have a cow, man!” much less often than Bart Simpson says it, but when I do say it, I am copying Bart. Sherlock Holmes fan fiction has Holmes saying, “elementary” much more than he does in Doyle’s stories, but the catchphrase does come from Doyle.

My impression of academic linguistics from close second-hand over many years is definitely not that esoteric criteria Trump common sense in linguistics. On the contrary, careful critical thinking about points like this seems to be what linguistics is all about. So if Davis raised his footnote at any linguistics conference dinners that I’ve attended, I really don’t think anyone would be saying, “Oh, you’re not a linguist so you just don’t realize how decisive a big use frequency difference is.” People would be saying, “Yes, of course. Where on Earth did you find that wild misuse of statistics? Somebody has to straighten out that student before they submit their thesis.”

[Do we really have to autocorrect the verb “Trump” to be capitalized? Not everything is about the guy. Man.]

[malkie]

If you have two extensive corpuses of independently produced texts, then I expect that a big difference in frequencies of use of a structure can indeed be one of the things that makes you say they are different dialects. Davis’s point sounds perfectly right, though. I really don’t see how one can conclude, just from the use frequency difference, that one text was not an influence on the other.

I say, “Don’t have a cow, man!” much less often than Bart Simpson says it, but when I do say it, I am copying Bart. Sherlock Holmes fan fiction has Holmes saying, “elementary” much more than he does in Doyle’s stories, but the catchphrase does come from Doyle.

My impression of academic linguistics from close second-hand over many years is definitely not that esoteric criteria Trump common sense in linguistics. On the contrary, careful critical thinking about points like this seems to be what linguistics is all about. So if Davis raised his footnote at any linguistics conference dinners that I’ve attended, I really don’t think anyone would be saying, “Oh, you’re not a linguist so you just don’t realize how decisive a big use frequency difference is.” People would be saying, “Yes, of course. Where on Earth did you find that wild misuse of statistics? Somebody has to straighten out that student before they submit their thesis.”

[Do we really have to autocorrect the verb “Trump” to be capitalized? Not everything is about the guy. Man.]

To your [] comment: we have seen autocorrect on this board break a URL by capitalizing 𝐥𝐝𝐬. It's sometimes useful to use autocorrect to expand abbreviations like "in my opinion", but 𝐈𝐌𝐎 in the end it's not worth having when it cannot distinguish by context.

[Marcus]

Peterson's support of Carmavk and Skousen:

The original manuscript of the Book of Mormon and, to a significant degree, its first published edition, contained a great deal of “nonstandard” English grammar, which provoked mocking laughter among some critics. That nonstandard grammar has largely been removed from standard editions of the Book of Mormon—some of it by Joseph Smith himself for the 1837 printing—but it has been restored in Skousen’s Yale edition. Skousen and Carmack contend that the “bad grammar” of the original text would have been acceptable language usage in the English of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (known as Early Modern English), and that it can even be found in scholarly writing published in the 1500s and 1600s. Examples can be identified in Early Modern English for virtually each case of the Book of Mormon’s “nonstandard” language.

[Skousen and Carmack] ...have found that, with only a few exceptions, the meanings of the Book of Mormon words agree with how they were used in English from the 1530s up through the 1730s and that, in fact, a large number of these words had lost those meanings at least a century or more before the Book of Mormon was translated in 1828–1829.

Some have found it difficult to accept the presence of Early Modern English in the original text of the Book of Mormon—especially those who assume that Joseph Smith was the author of the text. A few have proposed that Joseph’s upstate New York English was a relic dialect and that the resulting archaic Book of Mormon usage reflects older language forms that had died out elsewhere in the English-speaking world but not in Palmyra, New York. Yet, thus far, they have been unable to find any evidence for such forms in dialect studies from that part of the United States (or anywhere else), nor have they found these forms in Joseph Smith’s own writing or in that of his contemporaries....

That aged badly.

...Still, although the finding is strange and was certainly not expected, the evidence is overwhelming that these indicators of non-biblical Early Modern English are, indeed, present in the Book of Mormon. Skousen and Carmack don’t try to explain that fact; they simply try to accurately identify and describe it.

https://latterdaysaintmag.com/the-journ ... r-project/

As Davis points out, making an effort to explain how something might have happened goes a long way toward understanding the situation.