Folding like Darwin's House of Cards?

[Tom]

"Moving on over..."

I recently spent $100 on two large volumes by Doctors Skousen and Carmack claiming, among other things, that a number of word uses, phrases, and expressions in the Book of Mormon disappeared from English one to three centuries prior to 1830. See The Nature of the Original Language of the Book of Mormon (Parts 3 and 4, Volume III) (hereafter NOL). https://byustudies.BYU.edu/content/natu ... tical-text

Imagine my surprise, then, when I learned that in a forthcoming book, Doctors Skousen and Carmack announce that they have determined that 10 of the 39 archaic vocabulary items discussed in the first section of NOL are not actually archaic but persisted through the 1700s. Well now. According to a curious introductory note, the two Doctors had been "hampered by an inability to fully use the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) database." "Now," though, "much of that difficulty has been overcome, and [Doctor] Carmack has spent the last year or so reviewing the potentially archaic words, phrases, and expressions discussed in NOL." Here is the introductory note's revealing gloss on this development: "Some of the examples given in NOL did not die out as early as they had proposed. But a good many solid examples still hold up as almost certainly or probably archaic." Well, that doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the Ghost Committee Theory, does it?

Some questions: if the two good Doctors entirely overcome their inability to use the ECCO database, will they drop more items from the archaic vocabulary list? Will the list eventually disappear like a 16th century spirit or fold like Darwin's House of Cards? Should I ask for a refund on my purchase of NOL?

For those keeping score at home:

26 archaic words and phrases
break ‘to stop, interrupt’
but ‘unless, except’
call of ‘need for’
consigned that ‘assigned that’
counsel ‘to consult, counsel with’
course ‘direction’
cross ‘to contradict’
depart ‘to divide, separate, part’
desirous ‘desirable’
devour ‘to consume, eat up’
extinct ‘physically dead’
flatter ‘to coax, entice’
give ‘to describe, portray’
idleness ‘meaningless words or actions’
manifest ‘to expound, unfold’
mar ‘to hinder, stop’
nethermost ‘nethermost’
opinion ‘expectation’
profane ‘to act profanely’
raign ‘to arraign’
scatter ‘to separate from the main group’
sermon ‘conversation, discussion’
study ‘to concentrate thought upon’
subsequent ‘consequent’
welfare ‘success’
whereby ‘why’

10 persistent words
assured ‘sure’
belove ‘to love’
depressed ‘weakened’
detect ‘to expose’
great ‘supreme’
hail ‘to challenge by hailing’
rebellion ‘opposition’
reserve ‘to preserve’
tell ‘to prophesy, foretell’
views ‘visions’

4 re-created words
engraven ‘to engrave’
molten ‘to melt ore’
rent ‘torn or rent part’
scarlets ‘scarlet cloths or clothing’

1 biblical word
may ‘be able to, can’

[Kishkumen]

I am not sure I understand their case. I suppose I should read the book. If 25% of their words continued in use into the 1700s, and Smith was dictating his book in the 1820s, could one not account for the archaic uses by taking the margin of error into account? I look at a lot of these words and expressions, and most of them are perfectly intelligible to me without explanation. How archaic is this really?

[Tom]

Here is Carmack and Skousen's analysis of "break," as it appears in Ether 6:10:

The NOL discussion under Mar argues that the Ether passage here refers to breaking the progress of people, not ships. Here the co-occurring archaic mar means ‘hinder, stop’, and it too refers to hindering or stopping these people in their sea journey. Some might be tempted to interpret break here as Early Modern English (and biblical) usage describing ships as being broken, as in Jonah 1:4 “so that the ship was like to be broken”. The OED refers to this usage as obsolete (see definition 2d under break: to wreck (a ship), obsolete). However, this meaning for break is not what Ether 6:10 intends to say, especially given its co-occurrence with the verb mar. Thus far we have not been able to find break and mar used this way in English after the 1600s.

(See here for one person's response to this analysis.)

Regarding this passage, Skousen has also written:

break and mar ... are verbs that occur together in the same passage, and the context requires the rejection of the normal, current meanings for break and mar. Here only earlier definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) allow the passage to read correctly:

Break ‘to stop’ or ‘to interrupt’; Mar ‘to hinder’ or ‘to stop’

“no monster of the sea could break them, neither whale that could mar them” (Ether 6:10)

In both cases the pronoun them refers to the people of Jared, not to their vessels.

Thoughts?

[Kishkumen]

Yeah, I don’t see how these don’t mean break and mar in the ordinary senses of those words. How many of us have seen images or read passages depicting monsters breaking ships? How is this even deemed interesting?

Go back two verses earlier and you read the following:

8 And it came to pass that the wind did never cease to blow towards the promised land while they were upon the waters; and thus they were driven forth before the wind.

So who is the “they” here? The vessels or the people? If you say in a sense both the people and their vessels, then you’re right. Same with break and mar. It doesn’t matter. This is a nothing burger. Anyone with rudimentary training in rhetorical figures can recognise that in seconds.

[Gadianton]

Tom,

This is incredible. It's following a similar trajectory as Intelligent Design arguments where something can't be explained until it can be.

Shouldn't there be more secure hooks into the 15th Century, such that findings in the 18th century are coincidental?

[Physics Guy]

Many of these archaic usages look plausible to me as mistakes that an uneducated person might make in trying to use the word less archaically. "Desirous" for "desirable", for instance, or "whereby" for "why". People I know occasionally use "whereby" today; I think of "whereby" as the same as "by which", as in "the authority whereby I do this." The meaning of "whereby" in that kind of construction is clearly related to "why".

When a word's meaning changes over time, the change usually begins as a mistake which gets made by so many people that it gradually displaces the formerly correct usage. If the mistake was that easy to make in the first place, because the first and second meanings were so easily confused with each other, then it couldn't be so hard to make the same mistake in reverse, and reproduce the archaic usage by accident later.

[Kishkumen]

Many of these archaic usages look plausible to me as mistakes that an uneducated person might make in trying to use the word less archaically. "Desirous" for "desirable", for instance, or "whereby" for "why". People I know occasionally use "whereby" today; I think of "whereby" as the same as "by which", as in "the authority whereby I do this." The meaning of "whereby" in that kind of construction is clearly related to "why".

When a word's meaning changes over time, the change usually begins as a mistake which gets made by so many people that it gradually displaces the formerly correct usage. If the mistake was that easy to make in the first place, because the first and second meanings were so easily confused with each other, then it couldn't be so hard to make the same mistake in reverse, and reproduce the archaic usage by accident later.

Excellent points, Physics Guy. It seems to me that an author seeking to sound archaic has a number of tools to work with, and there is no need to view these devices in the Book of Mormon as anything more than that.

[Gadianton]

Tom, 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? This makes no sense to me.

I don't want to get too cynical about motives as perhaps they'll come up with a good explanation, but 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 representative sample size. That would explain both the barrier, and why the barrier was ignored.

Can somebody put on their apologist hat and give a rosy interpretation that accounts for the discrepancy? I'm willing to consider it.

[Tom]

Tom, 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? This makes no sense to me.

I don't want to get too cynical about motives as perhaps they'll come up with a good explanation, but 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 representative sample size. That would explain both the barrier, and why the barrier was ignored.

Update: in a "pre-print of material that will appear in part 8 of volume 3 of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project," posted today on the Interpreter website, Doctors Carmack and Skousen provide a revised analysis of supposed archaic phrases in the Book of Mormon.

The Nature of the Original Language of the Book of Mormon identified 25 archaic phrases in the Book of Mormon that supposedly disappeared from English prior to the mid-1700s and are not found in the King James Bible. The pre-print takes another look at the 25 and considers a few more. It concludes that 14 of 28 phrases "persisted at least through the mid-1700s and often into the early 1800s," 14 other phrases "remain as probably if not certainly archaic" (to quote the editorial note), and one phrase is newly identified as biblical.

Please use a red pen to mark up your copy of The Nature of the Original Language of the Book of Mormon accordingly.

[dastardly stem]

Tom, 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? This makes no sense to me.

I don't want to get too cynical about motives as perhaps they'll come up with a good explanation, but 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 representative sample size. That would explain both the barrier, and why the barrier was ignored.

Update: in a "pre-print of material that will appear in part 8 of volume 3 of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project," posted today on the Interpreter website, Doctors Carmack and Skousen provide a revised analysis of supposed archaic phrases in the Book of Mormon.

The Nature of the Original Language of the Book of Mormon identified 25 archaic phrases in the Book of Mormon that supposedly disappeared from English prior to the mid-1700s and are not found in the King James Bible. The pre-print takes another look at the 25 and considers a few more. It concludes that 14 of 28 phrases "persisted at least through the mid-1700s and often into the early 1800s," 14 other phrases "remain as probably if not certainly archaic" (to quote the editorial note), and one phrase is newly identified as biblical.

Please use a red pen to mark up your copy of The Nature of the Original Language of the Book of Mormon accordingly.

OH man. How are they still holding onto this research?