Posted by:
RPackham
(
)
Date: March 20, 2015 10:52AM
Here is my comment on Brian Stubbs (from my article at
http://packham.n4m.org/linguist.htm - "Linguistic Problems in Mormonism"):
Some Mormon apologists point to comments by Dr. Roger William Westcott, linguistics professor at Drew University, and Dr. Mary Ritchie Key, who have written on the similarities between many words in Native American languages and the languages of the Bible lands. Westcott and Key, however, did not base their comments on their own research, but rather on research by Mormon Brian Stubbs. Stubbs simply scoured vocabularies to compile his listing. However, similarities of vocabulary (as any real comparative linguist should know) are not enough to establish a connection between languages. There are far too many such similarities that are pure coincidence. For example, Greek 'ho' means "the" and Hebrew 'ha' means "the" Does that indicate that Greek and Hebrew are related? Absolutely not. Aztec 'pax' means "war" and Latin 'pax' means the opposite: "peace". Is that evidence that Aztec and Latin are related? No. Greek 'theos' and Latin 'deus' both mean "god". Striking similarity, but they are completely different roots, even though Latin and Greek ARE related.
I would guess that a careful search of Chinese and English would turn up a list of words with similar appearance and similar meaning. Would any linguist accept that as evidence that Chinese and English are related, or that one is derived from the other?
Mormon apologists defend Stubbs' work by pointing out that he also shows patterns of sound shifts, such as have been observed in known language families such as the Indo-European group (which includes most modern and ancient European languages), in addition to the similarities in individual vocabulary items. However, Stubbs does not present nearly the quantity of examples that support the Indo-European sound shifts (the most widespread IE shift is known as "Grimm's Law").
Stubbs is Mormon and writing for a Mormon audience. He has flummoxed two retired linguistic professors (Key is now dead, actually). What about the thousands of other reputable linguists who are not convinced? Only lay people are convinced by vocabulary lists such as Stubbs'. (For many more such vocabulary similarities, see
http://web.archive.org/web/20060618231054/http://members.aol.com/yahyam/coincidence.html)
See also the article "Setting the Record Straight About Native Languages: Linguistic Relationships" at
http://www.native-languages.org/iaq3.htm#4.
For another example of an attempt to use vocabulary similarities to support the Book of Mormon see the article "Lehi in the Pacific" by L. Dwayne Samuelson with my rebuttal:
http://packham.n4m.org/pacific.htm .