The Lost 116 Pages, by Don Bradley

[_Dr Moore]

I will post shortly with a bit more to expand the WPM analysis to a full day's Book of Mormon translation effort.

Sneak preview: the MINIMUM theoretical amount of time spent translating per day for those 65 days 3.9 hours.

[_Dr Moore]

Legitimate point that we can't very well be precise on hours per day in translation from just a couple of fragment hints. I'll try another approach -- let's instead look at the MINIMUM amount of time required to accomplish the task, as described.

Laying out basic limitations of human speech and writing here, and allowing time for (a) dictation, (b) transcription, (c) read-back, I get a peak translation process rate of 3.3 seconds per word, with a more likely rate of 5.1 seconds per word if Joseph spoke slowly and the scribe wrote at average human letters-per-minute rates.



Sources: Wikipedia on written copying rate (above) and this link suggesting slow talkers speak at 100 wpm, fast conversation at 160-180 wpm.

Next, take 1 day of translation work, 4,211 words.



I calculate a MINIMUM time to accomplish a day's work of translation at 3.9 hours. That means Joseph speaking fast, scribe copies the dictation at peak human rates, and reads the words back like a fast talker.

I calculate a more likely time to accomplish a day's translation work at 5.9 hours. This is where Joseph speaks slowly (a.k.a., clearly?), scribe copies at something approximating sustained human averages for letters-per-minute copying, and scribe reads back slowly and clearly.

During this process, the amount of time in which Joseph is neither speaking nor hearing the read-back is quite significant.

In the expected 5.9 hour day, Joseph resumes dictation as soon as the prior passage is approved. On such a day, out of 5.9 hours working, Joseph accumulates 4.5 hours in silence while the scribe writes.

Now, would 4.5 hours in silence, out of 5.9 hours at work, be sufficient time for a savant bricoleur to invent and construct the whole story, one piece at a time?

Let's say Joseph took a bit more time after approving each passage before dictating the next. This would, obviously, add to the total hours worked in a day. But it would not add to the dictation time, the transcription time, or the read-back time. It would only add more time for Joseph to be alone with his thoughts, face in hat, in utter silence save the sound of pen moving over paper.

Just for fun, I wrote the formula to add that extra thinking time, or "studying it out" time, to the total. Then I compare the silent time over the total hours on the clock to get a percentage of translation time that would have been all Joseph's, silent and inactive save for his mind.

Here's the output:



As you can see, the green line assumes very high dictation and writing speeds for Joseph and his scribe. Starting at a minimum of 3.9 hours to accomplish 1 day of translation (4,211 words), Joseph enjoys about 80% of the day in complete silence, alone in his mind. That ratio rises to 90% of the day if they worked 8 hours, like military style (hurry up and wait). One pictures long periods of silence followed by rapid bursts of speaking, furious writing, approval, and back to silence again.

The red line assumes normalized writing speed for the scribe, and a slow talking rate for dictation and read-back. In this case, they had to work at least 5.9 hours per day to put 4,211 words to paper. At that steady rate, Joseph had about 75% of the day in quiet with his thoughts. With pauses after approving each section extending the day to, say, 8 hours, then more than 80% of the time was just Joseph, head in hat, thinking things through.

Picturing this as a fly on the wall, if you were there for 8 hours, you would see more than 6 hours of Joseph doing "nothing at all."

[_grindael]

The theft of the Anthon transcript? How then did John Whitmer copy it in 1831?

[_grindael]

Lucy Smith claims that there were many friends of Martin Harris who read the original 116 pages of the manuscript. How come there is not one account by anyone who read it?

[_Brackite]

The small plates of Nephi never mentioned any of the New World cities by name. The Tanners stated:

It shows that in his two books, Nephi uses the word "city" 12 times. None of these references, however, relate to the New World. They are all Old World cities referred to by Nephi or in quotations from the prophet Isaiah of the Bible. The Book of Jacob does not contain the word "city" at all. Neither do the books of Enos, Jarom or Omni. Even the Words of Mormon, which is inserted between Omni and Mosiah, does not have the word "city" in it.

http://www.utlm.org/newsletters/no72.htm


The plural "cities" is mentioned in Jarom 1:7, but it doesn't mentioned any of the New World cities by name. The word "city" is mentioned 20 times in the Book of Mosiah, 195 times in the Book of Alma, and 32 times in the Book of Helaman. The Tanners go on to state that Joseph Smith gave a lot details concerning the location of cities, lands and hills in the country where the Nephites had originally settled within the lost pages. But they believed that Joseph Smith didn't remember some of those details, and that is why none of the New World cities are mentioned within the small plates. They believed that is why Joseph Smith had the center of Book of Mormon action being moved from the land of Nephi to the land of Zarahemla.

[_DonBradley]

Lucy Smith claims that there were many friends of Martin Harris who read the original 116 pages of the manuscript. How come there is not one account by anyone who read it?

There are myriad things that happened in the history of this time for which we don't have firsthand accounts - there's nothing special about that.

[_DonBradley]

The theft of the Anthon transcript? How then did John Whitmer copy it in 1831?

He didn't.

Compare Whitmer's "Caractors" document with Anthon's (and others') description of the 1828 transcript. Either everyone who saw the original transcript was on hallucinogens at the time or it was a whole different animal than the later Caractors document.

[_DonBradley]

Dr Moore,

Fascinating!

I like the organization of data here, but unless I'm missing something - which I may be! - you are doing heavy specific analysis based on airy, non-specific assumed numbers.

When you say, "I calculate a more likely time to accomplish a day's translation work at 5.9 hours" (emphasis added), I'm not actually seeing where you've calculated this rather than just assumed it as a basis for calculations. If those starting numbers are not well grounded, then this could just be "garbage in, garbage out": it doesn't really matter how methodical the analysis of poorly grounded numbers is.

What is the strong grounding for the 5.9 hours of translation work per day?

And why would we not use as a benchmark a more specific time frame like that offered by Clayton?

Don

[_Dr Moore]

Hi Don,
The figures are grounded in the referenced limits and averages for human speech and writing. If you would like I can post it to a google sheet for formula interrogation.
M

[_Brackite]

I doubt that I will be buying Don's new book, but if the Mesa library has it, I will be checking it out.