Posted by:
Brother Of Jerry
(
)
Date: July 28, 2020 08:01PM
“The BoM is Bible fan fiction. JS wanted something that sounded like the only Bible he was familiar with, the KJV, so he did his best to imitate KJV usage. That's all there is to it.”
==Isn’t that what I have been saying? That JS wants something that sounds like the King James version of the Bible?
COMMENT: Yes, you have been saying that JS wanted something that sounded like the KJV. On that we have common ground. It is the rest of the stuff you heaped on top of that that I consider to be "overthinking" what that implies.
Specifically, You seem to think that the thees and thous are some kind of proof that there were no plates and no translation. There were no plates and no translation, but the pseudo-KJV English in no way proves that point.
Suppose JS did have plates and did translate them. If he wanted it to sound like the Bible, because it was a record of people that the god of the Bible chatted with on a regular basis, he still would have written his translation in KJV English.
You seem to be questioning how someone writing a document centuries in the past and in some foreign language would know to write it with thees and thous. The writer would not know to do that. Any writer of any document would not know how to write to a particular style that didn't even exist at the time. The writer writes what she writes. It is the translator that makes 100% of the decisions regarding linguistic style, not the person writing the foreign language document.
If there had been plates, they would have contained zero English. JS, whether author or translator, would have created all of the English text, in the style he felt most appropriate.
Translators have to make all sorts of decisions, and often they are matters of opinion. There is no "right" answer. That is why there are multiple versions of the Bible, and the Illiad, and the Odyssey, and Euclid's Elements, and various Roman speeches, etc etc. Somebody didn't like the decisions the previous translators had made, and thought they could do a better job.
Up-thread, LW mentioned the word "adieu" which appears in the BoM. Some people here seem to think that is proof the BoM is fabricated. How could a French word show up in a supposedly Hebrew or Reformed Egyptian, or whatever text?
A French word could show up in exactly the same way the 522 pages of English words showed up. Assuming it was translated, for the sake of argument, all the word "adieu" proves is that JS was familiar with the word, and thought it a good substitute for "farewell". The original document would have had neither English nor French in it.
Actually there is an even more fundamental flaw in that argument. "Adieu" is a standard English word, though not a particularly common word. All of us who saw it in the BoM could guess what it meant. Yes, it came to English via French, which got it from Latin, but the English dictionaries I just checked all had it listed. (OK, all both of them, but unlike Free Man, who extrapolates to infinity from a single data point, I insist on at least two data points before I am willing to extrapolate to infinity :). So, all the words in the BoM were either English, or made up (curelom, ziff, etc), including "adieu".