Loan shifting the anachronisms away

[Benjamin McGuire]

but the cut portions, such as riding around on a tapir

But this is what makes the discussion fun from the perspective of a believer. The number of places that the text mentions a Nephite riding a horse? Zero. The whole idea of someone riding a tapir has nothing to do with the text. It is simply confirms that on some level, trying to take a word that has seen lexical expansion, or that has experienced a loan-shift, and to place it narrowly back into the original context often creates absurdities. We would get the same thing if we insisted that Marco Polo really was saying that he had found unicorns - and that anyone who was trying to insist that he had really found a rhinoceros is way off in left field (let alone the expectation that Marco Polo had that unicorns could be made docile by maidens ...).

If the argument is a simplistic argument that any mention of the horse is anachronistic because there were no horses in North/South America at the time the events in the Book of Mormon were alleged to happen (and certainly no domesticated horses) it doesn't have any meaningful impact. It's not that there weren't horses. The mention of the horse isn't out of place on the Brass Plates (assuming they were real). And consequently, it's not entirely anachronistic to find horses on the gold plates (assuming that they were real also). It's all about a place and time and the contextual meaning assigned to the word horse in the Book of Mormon. And the Book of Mormon was produced in the 19th century - so it isn't anachronistic there. We only get to the idea of the horse as an anachronism to the extent that we can argue that the horse in the text is meant to represent our narrow understanding of that term when we read it - and that it must have had that intention in the ancient source (the alleged gold plates). And perhaps it is anachronistic when viewed from that narrow perspective - but - you can't make that argument by suggesting that alternative interpretations - like the suggestion that the word horse has undergone some form of lexical expansion - are simply ludicrous - especially when your way of suggesting this is to make a caricature of the text instead of discussing what the text really says.

We get the same sort of thing in the Travels of Marco Polo (only perhaps more so). If we are going to insist that Marco Polo can only mean the traditional creature unicorn when he writes about a unicorn - and that he couldn't possibly be referring to something else (like, say, a rhinoceros), then we get the same sort of caricature of the text. And it really doesn't matter (if we do this) where Marco Polo's journeys were at, because the unicorn is a fictional creature.

And so, since the believer doesn't feel the need to address any issues that are raised that don't really address their perspective, and the critic in light of the uncovered absurdity feels no need to engage the believer, everyone simply ignores the fact that there are real things that can be discussed about the text - and that there are real issues that ought to be raised in that discussion. But, we never get there - because the train gets derailed running over the Tapir ridden by the Nephite (or, the fact that "the fossil record is placing evidence of horses increasingly closer to Book of Mormon timeframes").

[Moksha]

We get the same sort of thing in the Travels of Marco Polo (only perhaps more so). If we are going to insist that Marco Polo can only mean the traditional creature unicorn when he writes about a unicorn - and that he couldn't possibly be referring to something else (like, say, a rhinoceros), then we get the same sort of caricature of the text.

A rhinoceros found on the Silk Road would be truly delightful!!!

And it really doesn't matter (if we do this) where Marco Polo's journeys were at, because the unicorn is a fictional creature.

A Biblical unicorn would be extraordinary.

... because the train gets derailed running over the Tapir ridden by the Nephite (or, the fact that "the fossil record is placing evidence of horses increasingly closer to Book of Mormon timeframes").

If we discounted any animals riding the Nephites into their many battles, we could borrow from the imagery of Monty Python's The Holy Grail and envision King Arthur and his Knights galloping along the French countryside one foot at a time. Perhaps journeying up to North America for battle, shouting "Ni" at any miscreant mound builders (General Zelph's kin no doubt) who got in their way.

[Gadianton]

This idea of a goat fleeing from two lions could be understood as a prey-predator relationship, where the predators hunt cooperatively in pairs. Context means everything here (and of course is uncertain). Jaguars fit the bill, but so do Mexican wolves. I could probably find other potential pairings in other geographic locations. The metaphor in the text here would appear to be drawn from the ancient source - and if the language is reflective of the ancient source, it would necessarily imply lexical expansion in the Nephite vocabulary for both the goat and the lion - and the translation (lexical reduction) makes it very difficult to determine what that lexical expansion would have been like in the Nephite language use. The analysis helps us ask better questions of the text - which leads to more interesting and engaging speculations and theory. Lexical expansion connected to translation can explain the anachronism.

In the first bolded part, do you mean if the Nephite word referred to a big yellowish furry cat with a mane? That word being expanded to cover some other animal? And then in the second bold, do you mean us readers going backward from big cat with a mane, we can't know if it referred to, say, a wolf or jaguar?

I'm stuck on why the expansion would happen in the first place? Are you saying prior to the Nephite author writing the metaphorical line, that, say, the word Lion had been already referring to a Mexican wolf? Or that the author coined it on the fly?

[Dr. Shades]

This idea of a goat fleeing from two lions could be understood as a prey-predator relationship, where the predators hunt cooperatively in pairs. Context means everything here (and of course is uncertain). Jaguars fit the bill, but so do Mexican wolves. I could probably find other potential pairings in other geographic locations. The metaphor in the text here would appear to be drawn from the ancient source - and if the language is reflective of the ancient source, it would necessarily imply lexical expansion in the Nephite vocabulary for both the goat and the lion - and the translation (lexical reduction) makes it very difficult to determine what that lexical expansion would have been like in the Nephite language use. The analysis helps us ask better questions of the text - which leads to more interesting and engaging speculations and theory. Lexical expansion connected to translation can explain the anachronism.

There wasn't any need for lexical expansion when Joseph dictated the words "curelom" and "cumom." So why the need for lexical expansion for "horse" and "elephant?"

Alma 13:20 reads:

Behold, the scriptures are before you; if ye will wrest them it shall be to your own destruction.

"Lexical expansion" is simply another method of wresting the scriptures.

[Moksha]

This idea of a goat fleeing from two lions could be understood as a prey-predator relationship, where the predators hunt cooperatively in pairs. Context means everything here (and of course is uncertain). Jaguars fit the bill, but so do Mexican wolves.

Pretty sure velociraptors roaming both the Yucatan and the Delmarva Peninsula also hunted in packs. Of course, the Lamanites may have known them as Los Chupacabras.

While this may have happened in the past, time as we know it is relative; especially if you hold the Tetziquatl stone aloft in one hand and proclaim "I have the power of loan shifting".

[Moksha]

If we discounted any animals riding the Nephites into their many battles...

Are you insinuating that the Nephites may have carried their tapirs into battle? Ingenious! But why not choose the smaller capybaras, considering the weight of that steel armor and obsidian clubs?

[I Have Questions]

I'd wager one could take The Pilgrim's Progress, read it as a post modernist and find that it too reflects ones postmodernist perspective, making the case that John Bunyan anticipates that reading.

I have read Bunyan several times. You should read my essay.

Link?

[Benjamin McGuire]

I'm stuck on why the expansion would happen in the first place? Are you saying prior to the Nephite author writing the metaphorical line, that, say, the word Lion had been already referring to a Mexican wolf? Or that the author coined it on the fly?

This is, I think, a really good question - but it is a good question with real-world corollaries. This is why I like the Marco Polo example so much. Umberto Eco had a section on it in his book Kant and the Platypus.

I think that we (speaking of humanity broadly) have a tendency in our language development to do this rather than to invent new words. We especially love to borrow words. Another favorite example of mine is from Arkenside's poem: "The Pleasures of Imagination." It's not really for casual reading (it's a poem in three volumes). But there is this section, speaking of the creator of the world:
Know then, the sov'reign spirit of the world,
though' self-collected from eternal time,
Within his own deep essence he beheld
The circling bounds of happiness unite;
Yet by immense benignity inclin'd
To spread around him that primaeval joy
Which fill'd himself, he rais'd his plastic arm,
And sounded thro' the hollow depth of space
The strong, creative mandate.

Arkenside wrote this in 1744 - long before the discovery of the long polymer chains that we call plastic today, the word plastic meant the modeling or sculpting of something - and as a noun or adjective, it meant a person who modeled or sculpted. And so Arkenside is describing the creator as the great sculptor of creation. And while we can explain the relationship to our modern concept of plastic (and thus we can explain the process of lexical expansion and then reduction that we see here), without a good dictionary, it would be difficult for many to understand the meaning of the word plastic here. When I ask Google about the plastic arm of the creator, it comes back and tells me all about Alexander Primal in Final Fantasy XIV.

My earlier suggestion is that (at least from a believer's standpoint), the classification of animals in a way the connects them to Mosiac Law may have been important. And the easiest way to do this with a lasting impact in Nephite society is to liken the scriptures unto themselves - to assign biblical labels to native species. It is something we might suspect. There isn't really strong evidence of this - because the translation issue (the use of the King James language in the Book of Mormon) goes a long way to make this much more speculative. While we see the term "wild goats" in the text, and we can say with relative certainty that it occurs there specifically because it occurs in the KJV, it is more speculative to ask if it occurs because the Nephites are using the same term that becomes "wild goats" in the modern text and borrowing it from the brass plates? The lack of context in the Book of Mormon isn't helpful (that is, we don't know what distinguishes goat from wild goat, or wild goat from swine - or anything of that sort). And so, while interesting, it doesn't have any real role to play in this discussion - both the believer and the critic should assign the term "wild goat" to the modern text - and with that agreement, recognize that it shouldn't be considered particularly anachronistic.

And this brings us to the real incongruity:

There wasn't any need for lexical expansion when Joseph dictated the words "curelom" and "cumom." So why the need for lexical expansion for "horse" and "elephant?"

And this is a good question. If we were to develop any sort of explanation of what is going on in the text - this is one of the things that should be addressed in some way. And we can note that at least according to the text, there is an extra layer in here. Cureloms and cumoms are mentioned once, in the context of the Jaredite record (so what we have is supposed to be a translation of a translation). And the only contextual information we have is that they were especially "useful unto man". So what they are is anyone's guess. It is the appearance of these two words - which are relatively unique in the modern Book of Mormon text - that creates the discussion. I don't have an answer to the question of where this is supposed to fit. It is easy enough to make them invented words (there are a few others - like liahona), but it isn't a common phenomenon in the text. Speculation about what these words mean isn't nearly as interesting as to why we have them in the text. But this is the incongruity - and so this is where our discussion should be. The rarity of this occurrence in the Book of Mormon also needs some explanation. If we want to say that Joseph Smith simply came up with these - then why not put in imaginary names elsewhere? Why go from this sort of thing in Ether and then come right back to the Old Testament in 1 Nephi?

[Benjamin McGuire]

In the first bolded part, do you mean if the Nephite word referred to a big yellowish furry cat with a mane? That word being expanded to cover some other animal? And then in the second bold, do you mean us readers going backward from big cat with a mane, we can't know if it referred to, say, a wolf or jaguar?

I'm stuck on why the expansion would happen in the first place? Are you saying prior to the Nephite author writing the metaphorical line, that, say, the word Lion had been already referring to a Mexican wolf? Or that the author coined it on the fly?

Let's start by saying that if we take the textual narrative of the Book of Mormon at face value (and assume that it is a translation of an ancient text), then the only people who might have understood the reference to a big yellowish furry cat with a mane - were those who might have had something to relate it to. In my essay that I mentioned (I will put a link to it in a minute), I point to something that Nephi wrote that really fascinates me:

Nephi describes for us this body of necessary knowledge since without it Isaiah is hard to understand. This situation can be mitigated; Rabinowitz tells us that “even such things as the belief structures of a society must often be ‘explained’ to the reader before he can fully understand the text.”12 And Nephi suggests that his own understanding comes from this sort of experience and learning; he tells us:

I know that the Jews do understand the things of the prophets, and there is none other people that understand the things which were spoken unto the Jews like unto them, save it be that they are taught after the manner of the things of the Jews. … but behold, I, of myself, have dwelt at Jerusalem, wherefore I know concerning the regions round about. (2 Nephi 25:6–7)

If Nephi is aware that certain knowledge is necessary to understand Isaiah, and is in possession of that information, then he as an author would be expected to provide that knowledge so that his text too could be understood. Rabinowitz explains that a novel dealing with the political environment of the 1960s might achieve its intended “sense of impending doom only if the reader knows that John F. Kennedy will be assassinated when the events of the novel reach 22 November 1963.” The effect would be lost on an audience unfamiliar with that history, and if the author anticipated this in an audience, he would need to “rewrite the book accordingly.”13 Nephi, on the other hand, while recognizing this issue, takes us in the opposite direction:

For I, Nephi, have not taught them many things concerning the manner of the Jews; … But behold, I, Nephi, have not taught my children after the manner of the Jews. (2 Nephi 25:2, 6)

Nephi has deliberately prevented his authorial audience from being able to understand Isaiah in the same way that Nephi understands Isaiah, and at the same time, he is letting that audience know that this step in his writing is not merely accidental, or caused by Nephi’s own flawed assumptions in creating his authorial audience. This development is deliberate. What remains is something even more radical. The authorial audience is an audience that doesn’t have this social and cultural knowledge and, in fact, that may have no recourse to receive it. Nephi withheld this information from the authorial audience.

So, at some point, there would be (for the Nephites) a transition between a text that is well understood (along with its referents) to a text that isn't well understood (with it referents) and this transition would happen very quickly. In a counterpoint to this, Nephi provides us with a different reading strategy in which we liken the text to ourselves. And if this included lexical expansion (or even in the longer view of things more of a lexical substitution), the old meanings and referents disappear to be replaced by new meanings and referents. This is a process which happens all the time in language (although usually not nearly as quickly).

And a final note on the why ... there is a suggestion that the written language didn't entirely align to the spoken language (this is more than a little confused in the text). The Brass Plates - Egyptian? The spoken language - Hebrew? The written language of the gold plates - some sort of Egyptian-Hebrew fusion? This is a bit of a mess - but it may also help us to understand why the written language might have more of these expansions than the spoken language. But how would all of this be reflected in the alleged modern translation anyways ...

[Benjamin McGuire]

Link?

https://scholarsarchive.BYU.edu/cgi/vie ... terpreter