Response to Jockers, Criddle, et al., Now Available

[_MCB]

I'm far more interested in panning out those few nuggets of
LDS text-critical analysis that are truly useful to the non-Mormon. And -- I'd be most happy to surrender those tasks to a
handful of,,, grad students. It's tiresome stuff --

I'm back to being a grad student, now? OK

I'm not finding much in terms of bad KJE, seems like after I Nephi, Grandin & Co. did some editing. However, there are two constructions that are very interesting in their frequency counts. :) Dale, I'll e-mail results to you when I am done.

[_Benjamin McGuire]

Some comments - first for MCB -

Finding a-prefixed verbs in the text of the Book of Mormon has very little meaning unless you can show that this is somehow significant. You are going to run into a major, major problem with this. I have a large collection of early 19th century literature in my personal library. I have access to much, much larger digital archives. These a-prefixed verbs occur with some regularity across a wide spectrum of early 19th century literature. Finding them in the Book of Mormon is rather meaningless unless you can show something about the Book of Mormon's usage that is significantly different from other contemporary usage of the same terms. They are not so rare that they only occur in your Appalachian dialect, or in texts that are attempting to mimic archaic language.

Roger writes:

I'm curious as to whether you would agree that a King James Bible was likely used in Book of Mormon production?

On some level, Roger, this isn't a very relevant question. It comes from the problematic way that you view as the relationships between texts. There is no question that language in the Book of Mormon occurs in the way it does precisely because of the way the language occurs in the King James version of the Bible. There is then, a genetic connection between the two. Exactly how that connection occurs is far less important than the fact that the connection occurs. We can say with a fair degree of certainty that the Book of Mormon relies on the KJV. We can't say with any certainty at all that a copy of the KJV was used during the production of the Book of Mormon.

Dale writes:

But they are obviously not interested in critical analysis of the text.

Speaking for myself, Dale, I find that your obsessions with the text simply do not yield the kind of valuable data that you believe that it yields. Consistently, what you do seems to be contradicted by current methods and scholarship. Personally, I think that you have produced a theory, and much of your data collection has been theory driven - and you have tended to focus that research in areas that you believe yields results that favor your theory. I think that LDS members produce a great deal of critical analysis of the text of the Book of Mormon, and that in general, since it has little impact on your theory, you simply tend to ignore it as irrelevant.

My own work, for example, which deals with rhetorical content, structuring of the narratives, questions of authorial intent and so on are certainly not 19th century approaches - and they certainly do yield very interesting things about the text - but, I think, they are largely lost on you.

Roger also wrote this:

If Ben's earlier observation that Jocker's methodology works "very, very well" when the real author is in the mix, I take that as rather encouraging given that I don't believe Nephi was a real person (for reasons other than word print data). If Ben is correct in that observation then the only way Bruce's results are meaningful is if Nephi was indeed a real person.

I disagree with you. It is always easier to disqualify a candidate for authorship than to prove that someone is an author of a disputed text. What Bruce's method does is to put a control into the Jockers method to eliminate false positives - by creating a limit at which point we can suggest that a proposed author cannot be the real author of a text. That Bruce's method can be applied to other text cases means that Bruce's results are meaningful even if there were no real Nephi. What we can conclude from Bruce's study (assuming that it works well) is that Neither Rigdon, nor Spalding, nor Cowdery were the authors of any of the chapters in the Book of Mormon. And this is the case whether there was a real Nephi or not. Bruce simply demonstrates that the real author of the Book of Mormon chapters simply wasn't in the list of proposed authors that Jockers made.

You can be as confident as you want to about the fact that the real author is in the mix - but what is clear is that you can no longer use the Jockers study as evidence for that argument.

Ben M

[_MCB]

Finding them in the Book of Mormon is rather meaningless unless you can show something about the Book of Mormon's usage that is significantly different from other contemporary usage of the same terms. They are not so rare that they only occur in your Appalachian dialect, or in texts that are attempting to mimic archaic language.

We are not just looking for "a" [verb] "ing" We can, to some extent, when certain constructions are not evenly distributed throughout the text, ask why. For example, who might speak in the least standard English of the times? Who might equate kings with gods? Who might have dictated text, backed up, and revised, with the whole sequence recorded by the scribe? Who might have a strong background in the best Protestant theologians of the day? Lots of questions arise with a thorough reading of the text.

Ben, I always enjoy your posts. You are a strong, rational thinker, unusual for LDS.

[_Uncle Dale]

...
Speaking for myself, Dale, I find that your obsessions with the text simply do not yield the kind of valuable data that you believe that it yields.
...

Yes, I understand that. You are in a position to make a significant
scholarly/analytical contribution to text-critical Book of Mormon studies and I
expect one day to see some very interesting publications under
your name. But I suppose that will develop over months and years
to come.

I'd like to review your comparisons of Oliver Cowdery's writing style
and language use to the Jockers authorship attributions, when and
if you care to share those studies.

As a step in that direction I'll paste in below my own comparison
of Book of Mormon page 282 (but with the 1830 text) with Oliver's preserved
writings. The orangish-brownish text is that shared by both the
Book of Mormon and Cowdery. The underlines are contiguous words found in
Cowdery's writings, and the yellow high-lights are just a few of the
shared word-strings that I'm studying at the moment.

Jockers rates this part of the Book of Mormon as possessing the highest NSC
classification of relative probable Cowdery authorship. A quick
comparison of its shared Cowdery/Book of Mormon language with others parts
of the 1830 Book of Mormon text leads me to believe that Jockers has scored
a significant "hit" with his frequently occurring non-contextual words
examinations -- that is, my own, less rigorous identification of
shared language tells me that this is indeed a high-point in the
overlap of Cowdery/Book of Mormon vocabulary and phraseology.



UD

[_Uncle Dale]

...the yellow high-lights are just a few of the
shared word-strings that I'm studying at the moment.
...

That is to say -- I'm mapping the occurrences of some of the yellow
colored word-strings throughout the Book of Mormon text, to try and
determine their distribution patterns.

I want to study whether or not page 282 has a unique assembly of
Cowdery-shared language, or if the phraseology is relatively uniform
throughout the Book of Mormon.

I chose this particular page for my current studies, because of the
juxtapositioning of "every whit" with "a pointing." That textual oddity
caught my attention -- and I was left wondering whether page 282
more resembled the language of Rigdon (who used a-prefixed verbs)
or Cowdery (whose preserved writings include "a whit").

Perhaps there is a Book of Mormon page in which the language overlap with
that of Oliver Cowdery occurs at a higher degree than on page 282.
If so, I have not yet discovered that page in the Nephite record.

UD

[_Benjamin McGuire]

MCB writes:

Lots of questions arise with a thorough reading of the text.

Yes, but the issue is, do the questions still remain, and are the features nearly so interesting when we look collectively at the rest of its contemporary literature. It is the features that still stand out that are worth investigating. But you still have to go through the process of looking for similarities and differences before we can say that a particular feature is noteworthy.

Ben M.

[_MCB]

But you still have to go through the process of looking for similarities and differences before we can say that a particular feature is noteworthy.

Cognitively, the process is very similar to psycho-educational assessment, finding strengths and weaknesses. Thank you.

[_Benjamin McGuire]

Dale, let me start with some general observations.

Let's start with your chart that you provide. One of the things that is inherently flawed with your presentation is that you make this assumption that we can have something that I am going to refer to as "Spaldingish language". The Jockers study deals with this issue - but it deals with it by creating a set of frequencies - that is, it isn't just the words that get used, but how frequently they get used. Your chart just shows words. But, all of the words that were used in the Jockers study were included because of two features. First, over the entire corpus of material they had a frequency that reached a certain magnitude, and Second, they were found in every text in the corpus. These words cannot be called Spaldingish, any more than they could be called Cowderian, or Rigdonish, and so on. The most common hundred words in English make up more than half of the word count of printed works in English as a general rule. So showing us a page that is nearly all brown is rather meaningless. If you remember, back in early 2007, I generated a comparison of the sort that you produce between Spalding's manuscript and Mercy Warren's history of the revolutionary war. I did this for the first 15 pages of the Spalding mansucript (in order). I did not sort out the best or the worst. The overlapping Vocabulary for all 15 pages was something in the neighborhood of 93% (some individual pages were quite a bit less - as low as 80%, some were as high as 98%). This is actually quite normal. The most frequently used words in a language make up a vast disproportionate amount of the vocabulary we use. The top hundred words generally make up between 40 and 50 percent of the words we use. So, having a number at the top of your page reflecting a 94.7% overlap isn't actually very significant.

If you recall, when I went through those 15 pages of Spalding, and applied your own process for scoring them (albeit I did so conservatively, using only two of your seven criteria for significant word strings), of those 15 pages in Spalding, 1 page beat all pages in your Book of Mormon/Spalding comparison, and 3 pages of my comparison would have been in your top 5. (And that's your top 5 for the entire Book of Mormon/Spalding - I just compared the first 15 pages of the Spalding manuscript to Warren - my results, had I used the best 15 scoring pages would have been much higher).

My point in all of this is that your chart, standing by itself, looks impressive. But the moment I start comparing other texts to each other, I quickly realize that these kinds of similarities aren't unusual at all - they are normal (perhaps even on the weaker side of normal for the relationship you are trying to claim). If I take books that I know have used other texts, and compared them, the scores jump through the roof. If, instead of looking at the page as you do - we compare the vocabulary in total, looking at unique words, we see that there are some issues. The Book of Mormon and the Spalding manuscript have a vocabulary overlap of only 42%/40% respectively. Mercy Warren, who relied on Ramsay's []The Life of George Washinton[/i] extensivlely contains 80% of the vocabulary of Ramsay's book. (From the other perspective, Ramsay, who does not rely on Warren, shares only 46% of the vocabulary of Warren). Spalding shares roughly 2,170 unique identical three word phrases with the Book of Mormon. Ramsay shares more than 11,400 similar phrases with Warren's book. (By comparison, the English translation of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days shares 2,600 common three word phrases with the Book of Mormon.) The numbers between Spalding and the Book of Mormon seem to fit reasonably well into a spectrum of what I might consider unrelated works. This pattern extends to shared unique four word phrases (there are about 450 shared by Spalding's manuscript and the Book of Mormon - just under 500 between the Book of Mormon and the Verne book, and 3,700 between Warren and Ramsay).

What does this mean? That your chart, as pretty as it looks, is typical of comparisons between authors, and not noteworthy or even terribly interesting. But, because all you have ever compared is the Book of Mormon and Spalding's manuscript, you believe it is significant.

This is the great flaw in your research. Without a context - without a backdrop - what you have looks spectacular. But when we actually pull other texts together, do other comparisons, it loses its value very quickly.

There are always anomalies. There are always coincidences. Is finding "every whit" near "a pointing" that interesting? It could be. But, "every whit" I can find in hundreds of 19th century texts. "A pointing" is not as common - one archive I looked at a minute ago, turned up only 72 texts (although just pointing is common enough that I can find "every whit" near "pointing" in such a text). At some point though, we are going to find uncommon convergences in every text. But, what you are not doing is creating a "Spaldingish" voice, or a "Rigdonish" voice. Perhaps such a thing gets created by a study like Jockers (which includes more data in some ways than your own model) - but - with Bruce's publication, what we see is that the Jockers model of Spalding and Rigdon are not very close to the Book of Mormon at all.

Ben McGuire

[_Uncle Dale]

...with Bruce's publication, what we see is that the Jockers model of Spalding and Rigdon are not very close to the Book of Mormon at all.
...

Yes -- as I understand it, Bruce's study report makes it clear that
there is a zero percent chance that Oliver Cowdery composed
Alma 34 -- and a 100 percent chance that "Latent" (somebody else,
probably a Nephite) composed Alma 34.

So -- in order for my study to have any merit, I would first of all
have to demonstrate that that "Latent" really did not write the
text on that page.

Probably I will never be able to do any such thing. Whether or not
the consensus of non-sectarian scholars will ever conclude that
a Nephite wrote Alma 34, is beyond my capacity to guess.

But -- if Bruce and yourself are convinced that Nephites did write
the text, and that "Latent"="Nephite" -- then I suppose i should
keep that LDS conclusion in mind, as I try and dialog here.

In the meanwhile, I would very much like to create a map of all 239
Book of Mormon chapters, showing where the language of the text most clearly
matches up with that of Spalding, Rigdon, Pratt, Cowdery and Smith.

I can comprehensively show vocabulary overlap in an exhaustive
sort of way. That is, only our adding to the known writings and
utterances of those 19th century writers will effect the numbers
thus derived. Showing shared phraseology is a bit more difficult.

And -- even if I can eventually chart out the phraseology overlap,
I'm sure that the LDS scholars will argue that it was Cowdery,
Rigdon, Pratt and Smith who whose language was affected by the
Book of Mormon text after 1830 -- and not that they affected it before 1830.

UD

[_GlennThigpen]

I can comprehensively show vocabulary overlap in an exhaustive
sort of way. That is, only our adding to the known writings and
utterances of those 19th century writers will effect the numbers
thus derived. Showing shared phraseology is a bit more difficult.

And -- even if I can eventually chart out the phraseology overlap,
I'm sure that the LDS scholars will argue that it was Cowdery,
Rigdon, Pratt and Smith who whose language was affected by the
Book of Mormon text after 1830 -- and not that they affected it before 1830.

UD

If you can show that a phraseology overlap is unique to Rigdon/Spalding and the Book of Mormon, you may have a point. However, to show uniqueness, it would be necessary to chart out phraseology overlap between Rigdon/Spalding and other non-related nineteenth century writings. Also, those same types of writings would also need to be charted against the Book of Mormon. Have fun.

Glenn