The Mosiah/Benjamin Error, Reinterpreted

[Shulem]

Edited to add: this deserves more thought and time—more later.

I'm not trying to hijack your thread or dismiss main points you make in the OP.

My point being, there must be accountability for every single word that appeared on the stone in the bottom of the hat. The scribes attest that Smith translated character by character or word for word. It's not for apologists to tell the scribes how Smith translated but to embrace what the scribes said about the translation. The Mormons must account for that and quit putting lipstick on their pig.

So, what was the king's name written on the stone? What do the apologists say about that?

[Limnor]

Edited to add: this deserves more thought and time—more later.

I'm not trying to hijack your thread or dismiss main points you make in the OP.

My point being, there must be accountability for every single word that appeared on the stone in the bottom of the hat. The scribes attest that Smith translated character by character or word for word. It's not for apologists to tell the scribes how Smith translated but to embrace what the scribes said about the translation. The Mormons must account for that and quit putting lipstick on their pig.

So, what was the king's name written on the stone? What do the apologists say about that?

I understand Paul, and agree.

Please consider: sometimes the “apologists” reveal more than they intended about the text.

This is the part of Skousen’s thinking that I’ve latched on to.

I don’t agree with his holistic conclusions, but occasionally he, like other apologists, get near to “letting the cat out of the bag,” so to speak.

[Limnor]

In other words, I’m not as interested in “refuting” their ideas as I am in using them to inform my own research.

[Shulem]

In other words....

Okay, I get it. Feel free to explore the point I've made at any time or other posters may as well. I may choose to create a new thread in the Celestial forum that focuses on the king's name written on Joseph's seer stone and hold the Church accountable on that key point alone.

What's the king's name written on the seer stone?

[malkie]

Edited to add: this deserves more thought and time—more later.

I'm not trying to hijack your thread or dismiss main points you make in the OP.

My point being, there must be accountability for every single word that appeared on the stone in the bottom of the hat. The scribes attest that Smith translated character by character or word for word. It's not for apologists to tell the scribes how Smith translated but to embrace what the scribes said about the translation. The Mormons must account for that and quit putting lipstick on their pig.

So, what was the king's name written on the stone? What do the apologists say about that?

Translating literally - character by character or word for word - between two languages that are close on the language tree is not likely to produce an idiomatic result in the target language. To suggest that it's possible to have coherent English created by a literal translation from "Reformed Egyptian" seems unlikely in the extreme.

[Limnor]

I'm not trying to hijack your thread or dismiss main points you make in the OP.

My point being, there must be accountability for every single word that appeared on the stone in the bottom of the hat. The scribes attest that Smith translated character by character or word for word. It's not for apologists to tell the scribes how Smith translated but to embrace what the scribes said about the translation. The Mormons must account for that and quit putting lipstick on their pig.

So, what was the king's name written on the stone? What do the apologists say about that?

Translating literally - character by character or word for word - between two languages that are close on the language tree is not likely to produce an idiomatic result in the target language. To suggest that it's possible to have coherent English created by a literal translation from "Reformed Egyptian" seems unlikely in the extreme.

That’s exactly right, malkie, and your point actually cuts right through the whole apologetic “tight vs. loose translation” debate.

That argument looks something like:

1) Tight translation: Joseph literally read off each word or character that appeared on the stone, which the scribe copied exactly. And that’s what the witnesses describe, something like “the words would appear, Joseph would read them, and they’d vanish once written correctly; and

2) Loose translation: Joseph received concepts and then expressed them in his own words—basically an inspired composition instead of a translation.

But here’s the rub: you can’t have both. If your point holds—and linguistically, it does—a literal word-for-word rendering from “Reformed Egyptian” could never yield smooth English. It would look something like “I go store yesterday buy bread.”

So we’re left with the “loose” model: Joseph shaping the ideas in 19th-century English. But once you accept that, the witnesses’ stories about words glowing on a stone and disappearing once written start to sound less like observation and more like an attempt to backwards justify the “miracle.”

And if we’re left with the “loose translation” then the physical and historical claims fall apart.

If Joseph wasn’t actually reading from engraved plates—and we know from some witnesses that the “plates” weren’t even present at times during the process—then the plates become props.

If he didn’t need the plates, then the whole story about the angelic visitation and discovery loses meaning.

At that point, you’ve crossed from “translation” into inspired fiction—or, more neutrally, it could be described as an example of myth making through “scripture creation.”

[Shulem]

2) Loose translation: Joseph received concepts and then expressed them in his own words—basically an inspired composition instead of a translation.

This is entirely a modern day apologetic construct and has nothing do to with early Mormonism and explanations given by those who witnessed the Book of Mormon translation process. The apologists are liars. I refuse to even consider their silly arguments but will continue to quote Smith and his accomplices -- and will tell the apologist to "go to hell." GO!

The literal tight translation is what Smith pretended to do:

I wish to mention here, that the title-page of the Book of Mormon is a literal translation, taken from the very last leaf, on the left hand side of the collection or book of plates, which contained the record which has been translated, the language of the whole running the same as all Hebrew writing in general; and that said title-page is not by any means a modern composition, either of mine or of any other man who has lived or does live in this generation. Therefore, in order to correct an error which generally exists concerning it, I give below that part of the title-page of the English version of the Book of Mormon, which is a genuine and literal translation of the title-page of the original Book of Mormon, as recorded on the plates.

[Limnor]

2) Loose translation: Joseph received concepts and then expressed them in his own words—basically an inspired composition instead of a translation.

This is entirely a modern day apologetic construct and has nothing do to with early Mormonism and explanations given by those who witnessed the Book of Mormon translation process. The apologists are liars. I refuse to even consider their silly arguments but will continue to quote Smith and his accomplices -- and will tell the apologist to "go to hell." GO!

The literal tight translation is what Smith pretended to do:

I wish to mention here, that the title-page of the Book of Mormon is a literal translation, taken from the very last leaf, on the left hand side of the collection or book of plates, which contained the record which has been translated, the language of the whole running the same as all Hebrew writing in general; and that said title-page is not by any means a modern composition, either of mine or of any other man who has lived or does live in this generation. Therefore, in order to correct an error which generally exists concerning it, I give below that part of the title-page of the English version of the Book of Mormon, which is a genuine and literal translation of the title-page of the original Book of Mormon, as recorded on the plates.

I get where you’re coming from, Paul, and I don’t disagree that Joseph and his early followers described the process as a literal, word-for-word translation.

My view is just that the evidence points to something more complex in practice. To outside observers and witnesses, it may have appeared “tight” when he was reading directly from a source—whether the KJV or another text—and “looser” when he was expanding or reframing his own life experiences and ideas.

Either way, I don’t think he was translating in any conventional sense of that word.

The whole debate assumes ancient plates existed and that some form of translation actually happened. I don’t start there.

The textual and historical evidence doesn’t support a literal translation event at all—it points to composition, not conversion of language.

Whether “tight” or “loose,” those terms only describe how Joseph created the text, not what he was translating, because there’s no credible evidence that any ancient record was ever in play.

[malkie]

Translating literally - character by character or word for word - between two languages that are close on the language tree is not likely to produce an idiomatic result in the target language. To suggest that it's possible to have coherent English created by a literal translation from "Reformed Egyptian" seems unlikely in the extreme.

That’s exactly right, malkie, and your point actually cuts right through the whole apologetic “tight vs. loose translation” debate.

That argument looks something like:

1) Tight translation: Joseph literally read off each word or character that appeared on the stone, which the scribe copied exactly. And that’s what the witnesses describe, something like “the words would appear, Joseph would read them, and they’d vanish once written correctly; and

2) Loose translation: Joseph received concepts and then expressed them in his own words—basically an inspired composition instead of a translation.

But here’s the rub: you can’t have both. If your point holds—and linguistically, it does—a literal word-for-word rendering from “Reformed Egyptian” could never yield smooth English. It would look something like “I go store yesterday buy bread.”

So we’re left with the “loose” model: Joseph shaping the ideas in 19th-century English. But once you accept that, the witnesses’ stories about words glowing on a stone and disappearing once written start to sound less like observation and more like an attempt to backwards justify the “miracle.”

And if we’re left with the “loose translation” then the physical and historical claims fall apart.

If Joseph wasn’t actually reading from engraved plates—and we know from some witnesses that the “plates” weren’t even present at times during the process—then the plates become props.

If he didn’t need the plates, then the whole story about the angelic visitation and discovery loses meaning.

At that point, you’ve crossed from “translation” into inspired fiction—or, more neutrally, it could be described as an example of myth making through “scripture creation.”

I would be very surprised to see anything as coherent as “I go store yesterday buy bread.”

I'm not a linguist, but I know that, for example, some languages have extensive case markers that make the order of words in a sentence almost, if not entirely, arbitrary; and some have a fairly strict clause and verb ordering system that may result in very non-English word orders.

In Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter illustrates the how, in German, a sentence with subordinate clauses has verb phrases piling up at the end - distinctly not idiomatic in English. He writes a complex-compound sentence in German, and then provides the following literal translation:

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

I can only imagine that Reformed Egyptian would diverge much further from idiomatic English when subjected to literal translation.

[Shulem]

I get where you’re coming from....

That's what makes these discussions interesting and diverse. Our personal interests are directed in things that resonate with what attracts us.

Carry on. I'll post a separate thread in Celestial that concentrates on the process, claims, and beliefs expressed by those who originally sponsored the Book of Mormon. The translation of the king's name is what interests me. The Church today is 100% irrelevant and its apologists are corrupt.