Loan shifting the anachronisms away

[tapirrider]

Mayans named the horse with the same word they used for a tapir but that offers no proof that Lehi's people, who knew what a horse was, called a tapir a horse.

For loan shifting to provide any evidence for the Book of Mormon horse, the Mayan word for tapir would have to have elements of the Hebrew or Egyptian word for horse. No native word for horse from anywhere in the Americas has any similarity with the ancient Hebrew or Egyptian word for horse.

The only cases for the loan shift are in fact from European contact with the introduced horse and the use of native words to name the horse. Native words for horse have nothing in common with ancient Hebrew or Egyptian words for horse.

[I Have Questions]

Hey Benjamin,

Please give me a TL;DR. So, is your point that using the concept of "loan shifting" [as a way to nullify mentions of animals in the Book of Mormon that didn't actually exist in the Americas] is an illegitimate apologetic?

Not illegitimate - just wrong.

Definitions -

Loan word: A loan word is a word that is borrowed from another language.

Lexical Expansion: Adding a new word to a language or expanding the meaning of an existing word to include new meanings.

Loan Shift: A type of lexical expansion that occurs when a loan-word causes lexical expansion in other existing (not borrowed) words in a language.

I'll work backwards and explain why this creates a problem. So to use the idea of a loan-shift as an explanation for an alleged anachronism in the Book of Mormon, the idea would have to be that the Nephites borrowed words from another language, which then caused a shift in additional native words (Nephite words). And this is where the whole idea falls apart. We can't relate this process back to the modern translation.

I'll provide an example from the link in the OP:

(Confirmed as a loan shift). Early critics claimed that cows were not present before Columbus, let alone in Book of Mormon times, but early European settlers sometimes referred to the bison as “cow”, and it remains the proper term for female bison, suggesting that the term may have been applied as a loan shift to the bison present in various areas of North America (despite questions about the extent of their range).

First, in this example, there is no loan. When the "European settlers sometimes referred to the bison as 'cow'" we have an example of Lexical expansion (on the part of the Europeans). There isn't even conceptual space here for a loan shift. For there to be a meaningful loan shift, there has to be borrowing of a foreign word - so if the Native Americans adopted the European words for bison (either cow or buffalo), and this caused a lexical expansion (shift) in other Native American words, that would be a loan shift. If the Europeans adopted a Native American word for bison into English, and this caused a lexical expansion of another word, we could find a loan shift. What the OP refers to as a loan shift can, as far as I can tell, only refer to a lexical expansion.

In this sense, the article is simply wrong about what is happening - the argument that there is loan shifting going on makes no sense to me.

Mormonism as a whole engages a lot of different ideas about the translation of the Book of Mormon and what that translation means for the text and its meaning. Some of these ideas about the Book of Mormon and its translation are better able to explain alleged anachronisms as language issues than others. Loan shifting in any of these contexts has no power to explain what is going on.

Thanks for the explanation Benjamin.

One wonders how such a basic mistake wasn’t picked up by the Interpreter article’s author - Kyler “what are the odds” Rasmussen. One also wonders who Roper got to proof read his book.

[Benjamin McGuire]

Mayans named the horse with the same word they used for a tapir but that offers no proof that Lehi's people, who knew what a horse was, called a tapir a horse.

I would agree with this - but it is worth noting that the Mayans using the same word that they use for a tapir for a horse is lexical expansion (which is a very common thing in languages), and has nothing to do with loan shifting.

There are several issues with the potential for lexical expansion in the Book of Mormon.

From the perspective of a believer, there are a couple of things that I think push for this idea (in the gold plates). First, a population immigrating in the way that the Nephites are described to have immigrated, we would expect some degree of lexical expansion. Second, while this comment speaks of the idea that Lehi's people would know what a horse is, this would refer only to specific writers in the Book of Mormon. Nephi and Jacob would potentially have seen a horse. Mormon and Moroni (who allegedly authored most of the rest of the gold plates) would not. This has a relevance in this specific hypothetical because while Nephi could (to continue this example) refer to both a horse and a tapir using the same word - and he could intend with that word to refer to both the horse and the tapir, it is far less certain (or understandable) to have a Mormon or a Moroni refer to both a horse and a tapir with that word instead of just the tapir. Third, there is the translation - and we run into the problem here that I discuss from time to time - what do we think a translation layer would do to any of this? Should the translation layer provide us with a functional replacement using the original meaning of the word that experienced lexical expansion? Should it provide us with a functional translation of the intended meaning of the word using the later hypothetical context which would include only the expanded content and not the original content? Fourth, in some contexts, there may be other reasoning that should be applied - the goat and the wild goat, for example, which may be language taken from the brass plates, but the translation choices would almost certainly be determined by the King James language rather than any actual translation of the gold plates.

And at this point, we are dealing with a layered hypothetical, the complexities of actual language change, and the problems of a presumed translation layer. No one is really interested in any of this (except for those of us for whom the theory takes center stage). And on some level, it stops having a strong explanatory power because of the hypothetical problems. As tapirrider notes - it "offers no proof" of anything about Lehi's people. Any argument which involves the adoption or acceptance of the hypothetical creates a circular argument when used as evidence for that hypothetical. The translation layer effectively obscures everything - and there is little surprise that critics and believers alike tend to conflate the translation with the source (the gold plates) because it simplifies these arguments - but at a cost.

For loan shifting to provide any evidence for the Book of Mormon horse, the Mayan word for tapir would have to have elements of the Hebrew or Egyptian word for horse. No native word for horse from anywhere in the Americas has any similarity with the ancient Hebrew or Egyptian word for horse.

Even in all of this, there would be no evidence for loan shifting. There is no suggestion at all that the Mayan language has anything to do with the gold plates - and by extension, the Book of Mormon. The only way that there could be a loan (not a loan shift) in what you describe is if the Maya encountered the Nephites - and (this is important) that the Nephites had previously experienced lexical expansion so that a tapir was included in the meaning of their word for horse. Then the Maya could adopt the Nephite word for the tapir from the Nephites. But, this makes little sense because it would also imply that the Maya didn't already have a well-established word for Tapir. There wouldn't seem to be any really reasonable basis for such a claim (the loan to other groups - we can, I think, come up with some reasonable explanations of a hypothetical Nephite lexical expansion). If there is no loan, then there cannot be a loan shift. And there are a lot of additionally hypotheticals here - including situating the Nephites in a context that overlaps with the Maya.

For those who are following this, perhaps this is a good time to introduce the technical definitions - (from The Idea of Writing, 100).

Most analyses (for example, Hock & Joseph 1996, Lehiste 1988) employ terminological distinctions introduced by Haugen (1950), who distinguished between loanwords, loanblends, and loanshifts. A loanword, according to Haugen’s definition, refers to expressions “in which speakers have not imported only the meaning of the form but also its phonemic shape, though with more or less substitution of native phonemes” (1950: 213f.). Phonemic substitution is the rule rather than the exception. For instance, when used as a loan in Dutch, the French word restaurant /rɛstɔ'r ã/ ‘restaurant’ becomes /resto'rant/. A loanblend is defined as “morphemic substitution as well as importation” (Haugen 1950: 215). An example is German chatten ‘communicate interactively via computers’, which is combination of the borrowed English verbal stem chat and the German infinitive ending -en. A loanshift has the two subtypes, loan translation (also known as calque) and semantic loan. A loan translation is “a compound expression with a new meaning” (Haugen 1950: 214). The meaning and the structural pattern of the loanword are direct renderings of the original expression, as English power politics < German Machtpolitik (power+politics). In the case of a semantic loan, the donor language induces a semantic shift of a word already existing in the recipient lan- guage, e.g., American Portuguese humoroso ‘capricious’ > ‘humorous’(< American English humorous).

At any rate, this part of the discussion is all about trying to understand the arguments about why the Book of Mormon (the English modern text) uses words that could be seen as anachronisms, and my response that the notion of loanshifting is technically the wrong approach. The other part of this discussion is the observations I have been making about why the question of why the efforts to answer allegations of anachronisms (assuming that the Book of Mormon is a translation of an ancient text) should be understood as being caused or rooted in the ancient text as opposed to being rooted in the modern translation (where it would not necessarily be an anachronism). And finally, I should mention (again) that the idea of EME in the translation is effectively an argument that the modern Book of Mormon text does contain anachronisms in its language usage.

[tapirrider]

There is no suggestion at all that the Mayan language has anything to do with the gold plates - and by extension, the Book of Mormon. The only way that there could be a loan (not a loan shift) in what you describe is if the Maya encountered the Nephites - and (this is important) that the Nephites had previously experienced lexical expansion so that a tapir was included in the meaning of their word for horse. Then the Maya could adopt the Nephite word for the tapir from the Nephites. But, this makes little sense because it would also imply that the Maya didn't already have a well-established word for Tapir. There wouldn't seem to be any really reasonable basis for such a claim (the loan to other groups - we can, I think, come up with some reasonable explanations of a hypothetical Nephite lexical expansion). If there is no loan, then there cannot be a loan shift. And there are a lot of additionally hypotheticals here - including situating the Nephites in a context that overlaps with the Maya.

Thank you for explaining loan and loan shift. I was imagining Lehi encountering the tapir, calling it a horse and the Mayans being direct descendants of Lehi, their present day language originating from Lehi's. Seemed to be the only way I could see to make any sense out of what the apologists say about the tapir.

[Dr. Shades]

At any rate, this part of the discussion is all about trying to understand the arguments about why the Book of Mormon (the English modern text) uses words that could be seen as anachronisms, and my response that the notion of loanshifting is technically the wrong approach.

Thanks for waxing loquacious all about the wrong approach, but the right approach to understanding why the Book of Mormon contains anachronisms is to accept that it's all made up.

The other part of this discussion is the observations I have been making about why the question of why the efforts to answer allegations of anachronisms (assuming that the Book of Mormon is a translation of an ancient text) should be understood as being caused or rooted in the ancient text as opposed to being rooted in the modern translation (where it would not necessarily be an anachronism).

But when one correctly assumes that the Book of Mormon is made up, then all the anachronisms are very, very easily explained.

And finally, I should mention (again) that the idea of EME in the translation is effectively an argument that the modern Book of Mormon text does contain anachronisms in its language usage.

Umm, the modern Book of Mormon text contains anachronisms in its language usage, EME or no EME.

[Marcus]

...And at this point, we are dealing with a layered hypothetical, the complexities of actual language change, and the problems of a presumed translation layer.

...Any argument which involves the adoption or acceptance of the hypothetical creates a circular argument when used as evidence for that hypothetical. The translation layer effectively obscures everything - and there is little surprise that critics and believers alike tend to conflate the translation with the source (the gold plates)...

Here's where you continue to lose me. This critic, at least, does NOT "conflate the translation with the source" because the "translation" was a creation from Smith's mind, as were "the gold plates." There was no "source" beyond Smith's imagination, set within his cultural upbringing.

Critics such as myself, as a general rule, do NOT accept or adopt the "hypothetical" that believers do. This seems to be a blind spot for you, as it has been pointed out multiple times, yet you continue to speak for critics, and you continue to assume that critics and believers have the same starting points which you define as this hypothetical.

I've pointed this out before. Here is the most recent time:

So how does this work?

If the Book of Mormon really was a translation of an ancient text, this wouldn't be in there - it would be anachronistic.

So, what if Joseph Smith, as translator, put it in there, or what if there is a loan-shift, or [insert favorite theory here]

Well, you can't believe that either ...

Is that how it's supposed to go?

In my opinion, Smith wrote a story that fit into the beliefs and cultural knowledge base of his day, which was similar to many other efforts of the time. It was a very human approach, filled with the human errors and biases of his generation.

The fact that his story contains elements like this (some of which are the anachronisms under discussion in the op paper) is more evidence that the story did NOT come from an ancient text.

It was simply a piece of fiction, written in the 19th century. It was just another in a long list of cons in which he engaged. Not scripture, not divine, just another con.

Please stop putting your assumptions and hypotheticals onto critics, they are not correct.

One last point, Carmack's assertions that Early Modern English is found in the Book of Mormon are not well received by linguists and academics here, or anywhere else I've seen them discussed, outside of the Interpreter. His statistical analyses are simplistic and inaccurately applied, and the linguists who have commented here find his position laughable.

[Physics Guy]

Yeah, Carmack did some cargo-cult scholarship: like the cargo cults' radar dishes made of bamboo, his work went through some of the same motions that real scholarship would follow, but without the necessary substance. For instance he showed that when a few other authors around Smith's time published works in faux-KJV Biblese, they had less archaism by various measures than the Book of Mormon. He had no way for accounting, however, for the facts that these other authors were educated writers writing to sell entertainment and were therefore willing and able to tone the archaism down. Carmack computes his usage rates correctly, but his analysis assumes that all deliberate imitations of KJV language would have to represent the same grammar, no matter who was doing the imitation or why they were doing it, and this betrays a seriously flawed grasp of how language works.

It sounds as though this Rasmussen article about loan shifting is also based on an embarrassing linguistics error, though perhaps only one of technical detail. Rasmussen seems to think that "loan shifting" is a broad term for all kinds of code mixing with meaning shifts. Even if we patch up his nomenclature, though, I have a hard time understanding his theory that anachronisms in the Book of Mormon's English text could be due to linguistic shenanigans among Nephites. Maybe the Nephites would have applied Hebrew words for "horse" or "cow" to some pre-Columbian American fauna. If so, though, this would just have meant that in Nephite dialect these words would have come to mean "tapir" or "bison" or whatever, and not "horse" or "cow". So why would translation by the gift and power of God render the words as "horse" or "cow"?

Why would any translation, let alone a divine one, render Nephite words into English in such a misleading way, just because those Nephite words happened to have some weird etymology? It's not as though the Book of Mormon consistently offers English renderings that reflect all the vagaries of reformed Egyptian etymology at the expense of meaning—is it? So why would it go so far out of its way to do that only for these handful of words for flora and fauna that all just happen to look like glaring anachronisms that Joseph Smith could easily have overlooked?

[Moksha]

But when one correctly assumes that the Book of Mormon is made up, then all the anachronisms are very, very easily explained.

To make sure there are no hard feelings with the Saints, could we add that this was extra holy make-believe? That would jive with Dan Vogel's assertion that Joseph was a pious fraudster.

[Chap]

... I have a hard time understanding his theory that anachronisms in the Book of Mormon's English text could be due to linguistic shenanigans among Nephites. Maybe the Nephites would have applied Hebrew words for "horse" or "cow" to some pre-Columbian American fauna. If so, though, this would just have meant that in Nephite dialect these words would have come to mean "tapir" or "bison" or whatever, and not "horse" or "cow". So why would translation by the gift and power of God render the words as "horse" or "cow"?

Why would any translation, let alone a divine one, render Nephite words into English in such a misleading way, just because those Nephite words happened to have some weird etymology? It's not as though the Book of Mormon consistently offers English renderings that reflect all the vagaries of reformed Egyptian etymology at the expense of meaning—is it? So why would it go so far out of its way to do that only for these handful of words for flora and fauna that all just happen to look like glaring anachronisms that Joseph Smith could easily have overlooked?

Hits the nail on the head. It's getting a bit like the mathematician who, a story runs, had a standard form he sent in reply to all the people who wrote to him claiming to have 'squared the circle' (i.e. found a ruler and compasses geometrical construction that produces a square exactly equal in area to any given circle). It simply ran:

"The first mistake in your proof is on page ... line ..."

The same procedure can, experience shows, be appropriately applied to any attempt to find a way round the obvious fact the Book of Mormon is a not very effective attempt by a relatively uneducated early 19th century American person to write in the style of the King James translation of the Bible into English.

[Marcus]

What happened to Gadianton's post?! It's missing!!