After the Spaniards brought the horse to the Americas, some Mayans used the same word for a tapir and the horse. Mormon apologists try to use loan shifting of words to make a tapir into a horse.

"If we find such loan-shifting in verifiable New World sources when the Native Americans and the Spaniards encountered unfamiliar animals, why do some critics think it is impossible that the Nephites would have acted any differently when they encountered unfamiliar items or had to identify different items with a limited written vocabulary? Perhaps the reformed Egyptian word for “horse” was expanded to include other animals that were in some way horse-like. The most likely animals to have been included in the expanded definition of the Book of Mormon “horse” are the deer and the tapir."
https://www.fairmormon.org/archive/publications/horses-in-the-book-of-mormon

Just ask the apologists if the Mayan word for tapir has any similarity to the Hebrew or Egyptian word for horse. Most likely you will get blocked from their blog or Youtube channel.

ancient writings that can be examined.

With regard to the Book of Mormon, the ancient writings cannot be examined because they're in a storage room in heaven.

We can only look at the "translation" without ever having any opportunity to compare the translation with the source text.

The "translation" was made by an erstwhile treasure hunter who found a magic rock and "translated" the ancient records by sticking the rock in his hat and looking for glowing words to appear in the rock.

For some reason, the rock translated some kind of expression of farewell in the ancient language into the French expression "adieu".

For some reason, the rock had no trouble in translating the texts of the ancient record into the English language as it existed in the early 19th century. The rock also distinguished things that were unique to the ancient culture written about in the ancient record by simply using the ancient words as is to refer to those things. For example: cureloms, cumoms, ziff, a "senine of gold", a senum of silver".

If the rock could make those kinds of distinctions, why would it fail to distinguish between a deer and a horse? Surely the rock's algorithms would know that "deer" and "horse" are English words that refer to very different types of animals.

So, logically, the apologists do not have a leg to stand on. But that is to be expected. After all, they're talking about a book that was translated by a magic rock. You don't really have to take them seriously when they start bloviating about "loan shifting of words".

Certain Pacific islanders used the same word that they used for piss to refer to rain, calling it sky piss (when translated into English). When they encountered snow for the first time, they called it "sky sh*t". That's about as relevant to the Book of Mormon translation as the Mayans calling horses tapirs.

The loan shift claim falls apart because other ancient writings can be examined.

Starting with the Maya word for tapir:

"For example, Ciudad Real recorded tzimin for the horse, an animal introduced by the Spaniards (fol. 119r). This term was the result of an extension of the traditional Maya word for tapir.69 A reflex is still found as cl iimin ("horse") in modern forms of Maya (Bricker et al. 1998), thus providing clear evidence that it was really incorporated into the language."
https://books.google.com/books?id=UdX2CzY1pTgC&pg=PA67&lpg=PA67&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

Tzimin and its variations do not match up at all with the Hebrew word for horse.

sus
https://www.hebrewpod101.com/blog/2011/01/15/hebrew-word-of-the-day-horse/

Tzimin fails as well with the Egyptian word for horse.

"The ancient Egyptians referred to the horse by its Asiatic name ssmt. Besides this, they used several Egyptian words to refer to horses, which were used side by side in the same period."
https://www.academia.edu/10530418/words_referring_to_Horses_in_the_ancient_Egyptian_language

Mormon apologists try to making something sound plausible to convince believers that there is evidence and that problems are answered. But the tapir claim is just an illusion that fails to hold up to even simple investigation.

Now if Mormon apologists could show that the Maya word for tapir or deer or some other animal matched an ancient Hebrew or Egyptian word for horse, they might have a better case for ancient Nephites using loan shifting. But that isn't what happened. Mopologists are using deceit and fabricating evidence.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 05/06/2019 12:09AM by mikemitchell.

"For some reason, the rock had no trouble in translating the texts of the ancient record into the English language as it existed in the early 19th century."

You failed to mention into the Elizabethan English language. That rock came over on a boat from England and had been in the ground awhile.

When thinking of the English language as it existed in the early 19th century, I would definitely include the works of Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible (among other works of literature) due to their continuing prominence and the fact that people of the early 19th century continued to study, recite and mimic them.

But the rock seemed to feel that it also should try to mimic the language of the KJV of the Bible, rather than the typical language used in most newspapers or books written in the early 19th century. It seems like it was quite a glitchy rock, the way it could sometimes do some very clever things, but at other times frequently produce very low quality output. Could be that Joseph Smith wasn't careful with it and it got banged up a lot.

Just because the evidence is fabricated doesn’t mean you shouldn’t believe it.

because it's obviously a test of faith. You don't want to fail the test, do you?

Some things that are truthful are not useful
Some things that are not truthful are useful

14th article of faith.

that blows away their scholarly pretensions. Indeed why wouldn't they look to ancient Hebrew or Egyptian vocabularies in their analysis? Why would Mayan be so different from the Hebraic language if the entire civilization was created by Hebrew-speaking people?

The sure sign of a fraud and a hoax is that you can come up with dozens and dozens of reasonable questions that the hoax believers cannot answer reasonably.

And that brings us back to the magic rock. Since the translation came from a magic rock in a hat, the only limitations on their answers to difficult questions are the limitations of their imagination. If the physical golden plates cannot be examined because they were taken up to heaven, why not the same with horses and wheeled chariots? There's a lot of space up in heaven.

I suspect that deep-down inside, most Mormon apologists who come up with these pseudo-academic theories know that they're the equivalent of someone writing a Ph.D. paper on the impact that elf workers in Santa's factory have on the North Pole labor market as a whole.

We routinely call the American bison a buffalo. See "buffalo-head nickel". Our borrowing a European name for an Asian/African animal and applying to to a western hemisphere animal proves what? Not much, IMHO.

Or maybe Nephi is what? From India? Vietnamese?

It doesn't prove anything for the Book of Mormon. Mopologists are using the fact that people do call animals by names of other animals to try to make a claim of evidence. But when the words are compared to ancient Hebrew or Egyptian there is no support at all. The Mormon apologist is really doing nothing more than what an illusionist performs with a simple parlor trick. They are drawing attention to something while concealing the underlying truth. Seems Joseph's rock in the hat worked like that too.

You never heard of Buffalo Bills cousin Bison Billy?

This is not related to the book of Mormon, but this a similar theme. I recently visited an extensive Egyptian museum in Europe. They had as part of the exhibits typical scrolls that were placed with the mummies. They had book of the dead scrolls that were nearly identical to what smith supposedly translated. These were very common scrolls. It is as if they were mass produced. There were so many. Smith clearly ignored the jackal head and totally misunderstood the canopy jars . I took pics and will post later. It is impossible the scrolls smith conjured into the book of Abraham had anything to do with Abraham. A clear fraud.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/06/2019 02:45AM by Eric K.

Thanks Eric. That similar theme is a strong example that Joseph Smith fabricated an illusion that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Mormon apologists resort to ignoring facts and misdirecting one's attention. They have to because letting the truth be seen exposes the fraud of Mormonism.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/06/2019 08:50AM by mikemitchell.

Nice post on loan-shifting.

All I know is that if proof of the veracity of your holy book supposedly gifted to you by an angel through the power of god comes down to this silly semantic game of horse vs tapir-- like tomaato versus tomahto--then you need to call the whole thing off. OR, would that be the "hole" thing?

¿ what is the reformed egyptian word for "bullsh!t" ? ~

Hzillerh?

By odd coincidence, it's "bullsh!t". It's somewhat universal.

What’s being forgotten in all of this is that based on new revelations from church sources, JS didn’t actually “translate” the BOM. He used a rock in a hat thru which words magically appeared from god. As such, the issue of what word the nephites may or may not have used is completely irrelevant. A tapir is a tapir today just the same as it was in 1823. Were the BOM a product of divinity, the animal being referenced would match the language of the people the writing is meant for. It would not call a tapir a horse.

Great point. The names curelom and cumom appeared on the rock but a horse is a tapir. Mopologists make my head hurt.

BINGO