Carmack/Skousen: "Virtually none of the grammatical variants listed in section 4-archaic grammar are archaic."

[Lem]

Cormack and Skousen have been redoing some of their research, and it has been posted on the Interpreter site as "preprints."

The most recent one was not announced like the others with a SeN blog introduction by Peterson, but only with a link, at the end of a long, unrelated post, dated November 20th. ( https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... rmons.html )

Here is the title and first sentence from Cormack and Skousen's work, from which the thread title originated:

Revisions in the Analysis of Archaic Grammar
in the Book of Mormon

by Stanford Carmack and Royal Skousen

Virtually none of the grammatical variants listed in section 4-archaic grammar- are solely archaic. All but the plural governments show up rather robustly in the 1700s....

https://interpreterfoundation.org/pre-p ... of-Mormon/

Peterson's intro on the Interpreter site attempts some spin, but in the end takes a fairly subdued approach:

by Administration | Nov 19, 2020 | 1 comment

In The Nature of the Original Language [of the Book of Mormon] (hereafter, NOL), Royal Skousen and Stanford Carmack indicated that additional research into the language of the Book of Mormon might discover that some of the archaic words, phrases, and expressions identified at the beginning of NOL had also occurred later in the period of Early Modern English. Regrettably, they were hampered at the time by limitations in the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) database.

But much of that difficulty has since been overcome. Accordingly, Carmack has spent the past year or so reviewing the potentially archaic words, phrases, and expressions discussed in NOL, and, having thoroughly weighed that initial re-analysis, Skousen has now written a fresh report on the subject.

We have already posted pre-prints of their revised discussion of apparently archaic vocabulary at https://interpreterfoundation.org/blog- ... of-Mormon/ and of seemingly archaic phrases at https://interpreterfoundation.org/blog- ... of-Mormon/.

In what follows — which is likewise a pre-print of material that will appear in part 8 of volume 3 of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project — Skousen and Carmack report the results of their renewed inquiry into what they had previous identified as archaic grammar. Most of the seemingly archaic grammatical phenomena treated in NOL persisted longer than they had originally proposed, into the eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries. But they have also added two examples that are probably if not certainly archaic.

These revisions illustrate the care and integrity with which the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project has been conducted from its inception. The Interpreter Foundation is honored to be associated with this effort.

— Dan Peterson

Regrettably, the 15th Ghost Committee is "probably if not certainly" fading from view.

[Physics Guy]

So for the whole Early Modern English thing it now sounds like what the particle physicists say about an interesting anomaly that dissolves under more careful analysis: “It went away.”

[Lem]

So for the whole Early Modern English thing it now sounds like what the particle physicists say about an interesting anomaly that dissolves under more careful analysis: “It went away.”

Pretty much. In a recent article I read discussing Clayton Christenson's debunked disruptive innovation theory, this highly relevant question was the topic of a referenced article:

Why has a mostly untested theory persisted and proliferated for 20 years?

In an interview with Goldfarb, who addressed this question in another article, the author states this:

The problem isn’t outright deceit, they argue, but the tendency — known as apophenia — to detect seemingly meaningful patterns in random data.

Goldfarb sees apophenia at play in disruption. “Christensen saw a pattern and created a theory around what he perceived, and everything he saw afterward fit that pattern, even when it did not,” he says. “All the evidence suggests that Christensen genuinely believes his theory. All the evidence also suggests that he doesn’t know how to reform his theory in the face of new evidence.”

Goldfarb is quiet for a moment. Then he says, “That’s really hard to do if you have so much at stake. And he does.”
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-u ... isruption/

Res Ipsa posted an article earlier today about apophenia, as well, in the Q thread that only reinforces the widespread nature of this:
https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a ... 0972548be5

Another fascinating read.

As a current example of apophenia, it would seem I ended up on the 2015 Christensen article containing the word 'apophenia' after reading Res Ipsa's article on it, and searching further on the word, right? But no, I was searching to see if anyone had commented on Carmack's latest 'revision,' and ended up on a thread about Christenson's debunked theory. Except that, pardon the snark, finding two Mormons who exhibited academically unfounded persistence in pushing unsupported theories isn't really a coincidence, is it?

[Gadianton]

The blog author wrote:

Regrettably, they were hampered at the time by limitations in the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) database.

Tom has a post discussing this here:

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=15

Tom quoted Carmack saying:

"hampered by an inability to fully use the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) database." "Now," though, "much of that difficulty has been overcome,

The inability to fully use the ECCO database and "limitations" in the ECCO database aren't the same thing. The blog author's paraphrase makes it sound like the database was defective in some way. Carmack's quote doesn't seem to add up to that.

I'll re-ask what I asked on the other thread:

was there any indication as to the reason behind not being able to "fully access" the ECCO? What could possibly be the issue here? I checked out the website and it seems like a straight-forward purchase and Gale seems to be a huge market player; was the database defective in some way? It's kind of hard to believe. It's even harder to believe that one would publish a set of books under that huge pricetag with a gaping hole built into the research. Wouldn't you work on solving the technical problems first before going full-steam ahead?

[Gadianton]

the rest of what I wrote over there:

I can think of one set of consistent facts to fit the scenario. Wiki says that in 2011 about 5% of the content was made available for free. There is also a trial version available, which I assume is also free for a certain period of time (don't know about content). Suppose the issue was that it costs money. Well, there are some limited free options here, and so suppose they did some "due diligence" with the free material, and they appeared to be in the clear based on the results of their then-method as applied to a supposed representative sample size. That would explain both the barrier, and why the barrier was ignored.

I fully admit this is speculation, and I don't offer it as fact. I'd be interested in other explanations that are consistent with the authors own words (and not the blog author's spit shine)

[Lem]

the rest of what I wrote over there:

I can think of one set of consistent facts to fit the scenario. Wiki says that in 2011 about 5% of the content was made available for free. There is also a trial version available, which I assume is also free for a certain period of time (don't know about content). Suppose the issue was that it costs money. Well, there are some limited free options here, and so suppose they did some "due diligence" with the free material, and they appeared to be in the clear based on the results of their then-method as applied to a supposed representative sample size. That would explain both the barrier, and why the barrier was ignored.

I fully admit this is speculation, and I don't offer it as fact. I'd be interested in other explanations that are consistent with the authors own words (and not the blog author's spit shine)

I totally agree with the trial version theory, but I have an additional idea, based on some comments made throughout the various Skousen and Carmack articles, as well as other commentary. Please note all of this is my memory, so I'm not guaranteeing it.

One of the first times the list of terms labeled archaic showed up in print (that I saw) was in a doctoral thesis, around 1988, by Renée Baumgartner (?), who gave full credit to her advisor Skousen for suggesting much of the list. She used the Helsinki Corpus of Early Modern English to support her conclusions, as well as the Webster 1820s dictionary. At the time, she mostly implied the archaic nature was simply an artifact of Smith's speech, and in some cases, simply error in interpreting the dictation process. Some were unexplainable, and she left it at that.

In 2005, Skousen published work on his linguistic model, unrelated to the Book of Mormon, that was tested on the Helsinki Corpus.

Also in 2005, Skousen gave an early interview to a FARMS newsletter (insights?) announcing that non-Smith generated Early Modern English had been found, and at some point, Lindsay on his Mormanity blog mentioned that those results were based on the Helsinki corpus.

Somewhere along the line, Carmack or maybe Skousen mentioned that the Helsinki corpus was based on British Early Modern English works, and didn't reflect american language usage, due to being a British corpus, and also due to something called Colonial delay (or drift?). Additionally, Carmack rejected the Webster dictionary in favor of the OED.

After that, even though the word lists were still roughly the same, there was a shift to using the OED and ECCO (probably with the trial version issue, as mentioned by Gad), but still for a lot of the same words originally proposed. Some of the explanations became extremely convoluted. The ECCO and OED "support" (as defined by Carmack and Skousen) for some of the early Helsinki corpus words became very bizarre.

In my opinion, this is just a realistic cleaning up of their work, based on starting with the Helsinki corpus, finding it didn't really apply, and then needing a different source. It should have happened long ago, maybe even to the extent of abandoning the model,, but it is still by no means a complete correction. There are still quite a number of truly insupportable arguments put forward for their "archaic" findings.

Bottom line, Skousen found Early Modern English in the Book of Mormon, around the same time that he was testing his unrelated linguistic model on an Early Modern English corpus.

The corpus used turned out to not apply to the Book of Mormon dictation, but rather than start over, Skousen tried to shoehorn his Helsinki corpus result into something he could support with an american Early Modern English corpus. The results have not been pretty.

[Moksha]

Regrettably, the 15th Ghost Committee is "probably if not certainly" fading from view.

Potentially, part 8 of volume 3 of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project could include mention of a painting now in the sequestered library section of the Hogwarts School. Even though out of sight, the committee could carry on undisturbed in the painting, and perhaps make brief appearances in Great Hall at special celebratory dinners.

[IHAQ]

It's fortunate that Interpreter didn't waste donor funding and time on this wild goose chase/folly...

[Philo Sofee]

It's fortunate that Interpreter didn't waste donor funding and time on this wild goose chase/folly...

[Gadianton]

Lem,

I'm going to have to slow down your argument to understand it.

She used the Helsinki Corpus of Early Modern English to support her conclusions, as well as the Webster 1820s dictionary. At the time, she mostly implied the archaic nature was simply an artifact of Smith's speech, and in some cases, simply error in interpreting the dictation process. Some were unexplainable, and she left it at that.

So she was doing research on the Book of Mormon? The Helsinki Corpus was the waters she was testing Book of Mormon words in, and the webster dictionary was the control? Do you know if she was focused on Early Modern English exclusively or other periods of English also? I'm trying to put myself in her shoes at the time. Why would anyone say -- hey let's test Early Modern English to see if the Book of Mormon could have been influenced by something that doesn't make sense to influence it? if that was the reasoning, then why not explore other options also?