tapirrider wrote:I suspect that Skousen and Carmack are fabricating a hoax of their own.
4 years after Joseph Smith died, this book was published:
Dictionary of Americanisms, A Glossary of Words and Phrases, Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States, by John Russell Bartlett, 1848
And on page iii I read this:
"On comparing these familiar words with the provincial and colloquial language of the northern counties of England, a most striking resemblance appeared, not only in the words commonly regarded as peculiar to New England, but in the dialectical pronunciation of certain words, and in the general tone and accent. In fact, it may be said, without exaggeration, that nine tenths of the colloquial peculiarities of New England are derived directly from Great Britain; and that they are now provincial in those parts from which the early colonists emigrated, or are to be found in the writings of well accredited authors of the period when that emigration took place.
It may be insisted, therefore, that the idiom of New England is as pure English, taken as a whole, as was spoken in England at the period when these colonies were settled."
https://books.google.com/books?id=9sVUA ... &q&f=false
It was a known fact in the 1800s that spoken, not written, English in the Eastern states was different from the English written and spoken in Great Britain. And its form was closest to the same spoken type of English of the early 1600s when the first colonists arrived.
Skousen and Carmack have proposed that Joseph Smith could not have known the grammar of an earlier English period. Nonsense. Published writings of the 19th century give hints that he very likely could have spoken in such a way in casual conversation. Mormons can't have their cake and eat it too. If Mormons want to insist that Joe was a poor uneducated farm boy then we have to consider the form of his casual vocal speech patterns.
This is an excellent find, Tapirrider. The Skousen/Carmack theory depends on assuming four isolated strands: 1) KJV English, 2) Elizabethan English, 3) Joseph Smith's spoken dialect, and 4) the more or less standard written English of the early nineteenth century which is only stylistically and occasionally lexically divergent from modern written English—4) is practically the same language as Skousen/Carmack use to their write their articles.
With this assumption, Skousen/Carmack then find grammatical oddities (let's call them), and one by one they attempt to show why each of them can't be 1), 3), or 4). Therefore, we conclude they must be 2) because these Book of Mormon grammatical oddities also occur in 2). 1), 3), and 4) are supposed to be the baselines against which 2) can be measured.
Throughout all of this process, the range I understand they have found encompasses all of about 80-100 examples or so—not 80-100 kinds of oddities but 80 examples of these oddities in total—in a 500 page book. That's not very significant.
So much for the grand results of the conclusion. But the string of starting assumptions is flawed too. They are supposed to form baselines, but they run together. For one thing, the 1) KJV and 2) Elizabethan English aren't that different; the most you could say that KJV represents a certain idiosyncratic style of diction, not that it is a measurably distinct form of English. And many of the 80-100 or so features that Skousen/Carmack find in the Book of Mormon occur in the KJV, but in the latter they occur with a different, usually higher frequency (a dead give-away not of genuine archaism but of imitation of genuine archaism). Neither 1) or 2) is useful baseline, at least treated separately in the way that Skousen/Carmack do.
But 3) isn't a useful baseline against 4) either. I'd really like to know how Skousen and Carmack formed the impression that they know anything about the dialect of Joseph Smith. Beyond the earliest Book of Mormon text itself—most of which Skousen has reconstructed! (thanks pointing that out and exploring its implications Gad—and a few journal entries (which aren't going to use past-tense narrative syntax), we have almost nothing written by Joseph Smith that wasn't mediated by more educated scribes. The most interesting part of the Book of Mormon text, and the part that has received the least attention while also (in my view) holding the key to the whole production, is that it is an oral text. It is written because it was dictated, but at a feverish pace and with very little editorial revision in the first instance. Only later editions received that treatment, as Skousen and just everybody else knows. But in this regard the Book of Mormon is also unique as practically the only extended evidence of the dialect from that region.
The fact is, dialects then as now were erased through the process of publication. We have 0 recordings obviously of native speakers from anywhere, and I just wonder how much evidence they imagine they have for the 19th century English spoken on the north eastern frontier beyond the Book of Mormon text. Skousen and Carmack basically assume that the standard written English of the time (which isn't that different from their own dialect) is the same as the dialect of Joseph Smith, but nobody really knows that—and observations like the one that Tapirrider has dug up show that there was a divergence—because there is practically no evidence of what that dialect was. This is true especially in the domain that Skousen/Carmack use for all of their evidence: syntax. Dialectical syntax would have been weeded out in the publication process to conform with standard written English.
In short, they don't really know anything about the syntax of Joseph Smith's dialect, and therefore they can't rule something as not belonging to it.
