Heavy Dragonplate or Extra Thin Tissue Paper?

[drumdude]

https://np.reddit.com/r/exmormon/commen ... mon_nahom/

What a wonderful read. An Arabic speaker put the apologists to shame. I wonder where Peterson was hiding during this thrashing?

[Dr Moore]

Nehem is also on old maps…

[Philo Sofee]

https://np.reddit.com/r/exmormon/commen ... mon_nahom/

What a wonderful read. An Arabic speaker put the apologists to shame. I wonder where Peterson was hiding during this thrashing?

That was impressive! Holy toledo talk about decimating the Nahom argument. Thanks for the link, that was worth the read. Yeah Peterson would lame ball it with some kind of comment about the guy not being able to translate Arabic correctly or something... I am not at all surprised Peterson has not responded. Apologetics cannot take on actual knowledge and scholarship, it's more or less blow hard rhetoric and appeal to authority as Smoot continually relies on. That Arabic guy was good! And what a sensational way to destroy the apologetic, an appeal to the Arabic Book of Mormon itself - brilliant!

[Physics Guy]

If [educated authors] were better at hitting the target of biblical syntax, why did they fall so short of the mark actually set by the Bible, and use many of these characteristics so sparingly?

Better doesn't mean perfect. And why would these authors even try to reproduce King James language perfectly? They were trying to sell books, not pass linguistics exams. They wanted to give ordinary readers the impression of a Biblical text, while retaining readability.

The answer, I think, is that these characteristics are generally not produced consciously--that these patterns represent unconscious habits formed as one picks up language from the surrounding culture, and that trying to reproduce them would be exceptionally laborious, even if one knew what to shoot for in the first place.

That would mean the uneducated amateur should be more likely to produce the syntax of his own dialect. Except every example we have of Joseph's own dialect remains a poor fit for what we see with the Book of Mormon.

In no way whatever does the innateness of grammar mean that people cannot deliberately speak in ways that would be non-standard for their own native dialects. People learn whole new languages, for heaven's sake.

[T]he Book of Mormon did undergo an editing process just a few years later, and it's clear from that process that Joseph was extremely uncomfortable with the syntax. That would indicate pretty strongly to me that it doesn't reflect his preferred psuedobiblical dialect.

Everyone winces at their own first drafts.

But I don't buy that initial drafts of pseudobiblical works would produce large amounts of hypercorrection that would need to be reined in via editing. If so, we should easily be able to find lightly or poorly edited examples of that in the literature. And we don't. And enough of it sounds biblical (even if it actually isn't) that I would think any editor would probably let it slide as just part of the pseudobiblical style.

Indeed, educated authors writing for sale might not produce Book-of-Mormon levels of hypercorrection even in a first draft. Education, purpose in writing, and editing are three independent factors that distinguish the two populations of pseudo-Biblical writing. Each of them tends to reduce excessive archaism.

Again, this assumes both that it's possible to produce these patterns consciously, and that Joseph and company had time on their hands to go through and make it old-fashioned. But if this was really the goal, why edit it out a few years later? Had they really stopped needing to convince people that this was an archaic book?

Anyone can try consciously to imitate the King James Bible. It doesn't take any extra time investment to do it badly. Reading over the text a few years later, it's not hard to recognize that you've messed it up.

[Dr Moore]

There might be some validity in the argument you are articulating here. The problem is that this verbal argument has no relationship to your math.

Right. He has to assume the conclusion (mystical) because otherwise Early Modern English is an anachronism which kills odds. By assuming the conclusion and setting an arbitrary boundary on the hypothesis, a conclusion killer magically becomes a critical strike. Amazing how if you assume magic, you get magic!

[Philo Sofee]

There might be some validity in the argument you are articulating here. The problem is that this verbal argument has no relationship to your math.

Right. He has to assume the conclusion (mystical) because otherwise Early Modern English is an anachronism which kills odds. By assuming the conclusion and setting an arbitrary boundary on the hypothesis, a conclusion killer magically becomes a critical strike. Amazing how if you assume magic, you get magic!

It's assume priesthood, get magic....get it right pal.

[Billy Shears]

Also, looks like Billy never addressed the way I handled the extinct Early Modern English semantics. I'm sure he'll get around to it, though.

Thank you for your patience, Kyler. Here is how I see it.

Background
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins with this explanatory from Mark Twain:

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

The reason I bring this up is because Huckleberry Finn illustrates ordinary people speak English differently than intellects write English, and these dialects can and do vary dramatically from location to location. Mark Twain identified new fewer than five dialects just in Pike County, Missouri. In the early 1800’s, dialects were probably stronger and more varied than they are today.

Furthermore, with exceedingly few exceptions like Huckleberry Finn, we don't have records of how people actually spoke in first half of the 1800's.

How to Approach the Semantic Issue
Apparently, Carmack has identified 26 instances of alleged “archaic word meanings.” I haven’t seen the list of the specific hypothesized word meanings. But in general, I would say the hypotheses that would explain this fall into the following broad categories:

1- The archaic definition is an example of a remnant of Early Modern English that survived into Joseph Smith’s dialect.

2- The writer really intended something different than the Early Modern English definition, but the Early Modern English definition seeming to fit is merely a coincidence that looks more impressive than it is because of Carmack’s and Skousen’s data mining.

3- Scattered within the 800 page book, Joseph dictated a couple dozen words that really were intended to have Early Modern English definitions that nobody properly understood until Carmack and Skousen did this research.

I would presume that 100% of independent linguists would think #1 and #2 are infinitely more plausible than #3. The objective of a proper analysis would be to prove that the incidences we have are not a result of #1 or #2. This seems especially difficult because we don’t have a solid understanding of the Wayne County NY dialect, the Windsor County VT dialect, or whatever dialect the author of the Book of Mormon actually spoke.

A valid statistical approach requires that the Book of Mormon be compared with books dictated by people with limited education who were from Joseph Smith's area who were trying to sound Biblical, not books that were written by intellects from across the English-speaking world.

Finally, a valid statistical approach would note that semantics and syntax are both driven by dialect. These issues are not statistically independent as Kyler assumes.

Kyler’s Approach
Kyler assumes that the count of archaic definitions follows a Poisson distribution with a parameter of lambda equal to “at most” 1 per book.

The problems with this include:

1- He is assuming a priori that the “archaic meanings” really are archaic and with much more than a gazillion-to-one certainty couldn’t have existed in Joseph Smith’s time and place. Doing this isn’t adding mathematical rigor to Carmack’s arguments. It is assuming that Carmack is right.

2- The probability distribution is made up and the parameterization is made up. There is literally zero justification for any of this.

To illustrate, Kyler linked the following wikipedia definition,

In probability theory and statistics, the Poisson distribution (/ˈpwɑːsɒn/; French pronunciation: ​[pwasɔ̃]), named after French mathematician Denis Poisson, is a discrete probability distribution that expresses the probability of a given number of events occurring in a fixed interval of time or space if these events occur with a known constant mean rate and independently of the time since the last event.

How could we possibly claim that the probability of an archaic word meaning occurring over the fixed interval of "a book" has a known constant rate of one-per-book, and that the chances of this happening are independent of the time since the last apparent archaic meaning?

From the perspective of Bayesian reasoning, he's saying the following with his actual math. First, let X be a random variable that is the number of archaic definitions in the book.

Under the "it's true" hypothesis, X is distributed with a discrete distribution where X = 13 with a probability p = 1.00.

Under the "it's made up" hypothesis, X is distributed with a Poisson distribution with lambda = 1.00.

(And remember. These numbers were chosen "for the benefit of the critics, of course.")

The experiment is then run. Low and behold! We objectively measure exactly 13 archaic definitions! What an amazing bullseye!

[malkie]

Also, looks like Billy never addressed the way I handled the extinct Early Modern English semantics. I'm sure he'll get around to it, though.

...
Mark Twain identified new fewer than five dialects just in Pike County, Missouri. In the early 1800’s, dialects were probably stronger and more varied than they are today.

In the 1970s, in the west of Scotland, there were at least 3 distinct words for what, in North America, might be called "soft drinks", amongst other terms.

Within a few 10s of km of each other, soft drinks might be referred to as "pop", "ginger", or "lemonade".

Strange as it may seem, nobody in my home town, for example, thought it unusual to ask for a bottle of "orange lemonade". There was no contradiction. If you wanted lemon flavour, you asked for "lemon lemonade". (Actually, that was relatively polite speech - it might also be pronounced "limalade".)

30 km away, noone would look strangely at you if you asked for "lemon ginger". You got a lemon flavoured drink - no actual ginger anywhere.

That's just the way folks talked, in real, everyday, life. Everybody understood what was meant.

[Physics Guy]

"Archaic" does not mean "lost to memory". Words like "whither" and "doth" are certainly archaic today, but most people still know perfectly well what they mean. Old-fashioned words and meanings often remain widely known, as old-fashioned usages, for a long time. From reading old books that are still on the shelves, or hearing old books quoted, people still know the old words, long after the point at which nobody would include those old words in a newly published book.

So the fact that a given word has not been found in even a large survey of books published after, say, 1700, does not mean that nobody in 1830 could possibly have used that word correctly if they had wanted.

This isn't even taking into account the fact that turns of phrase which would be very archaic in big cities can persist surprisingly long in rural colloquial use. That's a whole other problem with Carmack's and Skousen's claim of anachronistic language in the Book of Mormon. What I'm pointing out is that even after a word really has fallen out of every colloquial use, it can remain well known as an old-fashioned expression.

It certainly can happen that words or meanings become completely lost to memory, but showing that this had actually happened by Smith's time for 26 words in the Book of Mormon is considerably harder than anything Carmack and Skousen have done so far. They have already retracted a considerable proportion of the supposedly archaic words that they identified initially. Rather than solidifying our confidence that their remaining obsolete terms were indeed all lost to memory in Smith's day, their pattern of retraction makes one suspect that all of their terms would be retracted if they looked hard enough for counterexamples.

[malkie]

"Archaic" does not mean "lost to memory". Words like "whither" and "doth" are certainly archaic today, but most people still know perfectly well what they mean. Old-fashioned words and meanings often remain widely known, as old-fashioned usages, for a long time. From reading old books that are still on the shelves, or hearing old books quoted, people still know the old words, long after the point at which nobody would include those old words in a newly published book.

So the fact that a given word has not been found in even a large survey of books published after, say, 1700, does not mean that nobody in 1830 could possibly have used that word correctly if they had wanted.

This isn't even taking into account the fact that turns of phrase which would be very archaic in big cities can persist surprisingly long in rural colloquial use.

It certainly can happen that words or meanings become completely lost to memory, but showing that this has actually happened for 26 words in the Book of Mormon is considerably harder than anything Carmack and Skousen have done so far. They have already retracted a considerable proportion of the supposedly archaic words that they identified initially. So far from solidifying our confidence that their remaining obsolete terms were indeed all lost to memory in Smith's day, their pattern of retraction makes one suspect that all of their terms would be retracted if they looked hard enough for counterexamples.

Many people today can quote (or misquote) and completely understand phrases from hundreds of years ago that otherwise are not part of today's language.

For example, I suspect that few people use "alas" in everyday speech, but everyone knows what Hamlet meant when he said "Alas, poor Yorick", and didn't add "I knew him well."

Likewise, many people can quote "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?", although it is very common for folks to think that Juliette was wondering about Romeo's location, rather than lamenting his family allegiances.