I'm no Elizabethan/Jacobean expert, but...

In Alma 44 it says: "Ye know that ye are in our hands, yet we do not desire to slay you."

If Moroni was speaking to one person, shouldn't this be: "Thou knowest that you (or thou) are in our hands, yet we do not desire to slay you."

If he was speaking to a group it should be: "Ye know that ye are in our hands, yet we do not desire to slay ye."


I know the whole BoM is a mess (and this section is "bow down or die" nonsense), but stuff like this seems like such easy pickin's for linguists...

I found this website. Don't know if it will help any.
http://alt-usage-english.org/pronoun_paradigms.html

You're right in your assumption that the word choice is incorrect. The use of "ye" should remain consistent. But honestly, apart from inconsistency, BS, and boring, what the hell does the BOM offer?

bible babble

In King James English, ye is the subject form of the plural 2nd person, and you is the object form. Therefore, if speaking to more than one person, "...we do not desire to slay YOU" is correct.

However, if speaking to one person only, it should be: "Thou knowest that thou art in our hands, yet we do not desire to slay thee."

See more examples of incorrect King James English in the Book of Mormon, see "Mormon Linguistic Problems: King Jame English" at http://packham.n4m.org/linguist.htm#KINGJAMES

+1

Thank you, Richard.

Why do Mormons care about a dialect of English that is over 400 years old? It's not biblical its OLD English. If it was biblical it would be in Greek Hebrew or Aramaic.

thegoodfight Wrote:
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> Why do Mormons care about a dialect of English
> that is over 400 years old? It's not biblical its
> OLD English. If it was biblical it would be in
> Greek Hebrew or Aramaic.

Well, the BOM is written in fake Early Modern English. That's why we can understand what's written, even if it's bullshit. Old English is unintelligible to almost every modern person. Beowulf's the classic example:

Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,

Now THAT's Old English :D

(not all that relevant, but I like to see consistent terminology when it comes to linguistics. And everything else, for that matter.)


As for being written in Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic... The BOM is allegedly a translation, thus Inglés.

Even if the ye, you, and thou were correct, the other atrocities committed against style in that one sentence alone exemplify why the BoM is unreadable.

First phrase: "Ye know that ye are in our hands" This is a colloquial metaphor with some "ye's" arbitrarily thrown in, almost at random. When RPackham fixed it above by replacing the ye with thou, he also fixed the verbs: "Thou knowest that thou art in our hands." Still ponderous and silly, but the style is consistent.

The next phrase, "yet we do not desire to slay you." This is terribly mock-serious when juxtaposed with common verbs "know" and "are." With those verbs, "desire" should be "want," and "slay" should be "kill." Then the sentence would be consistently straight-forward and colloquial: "You know that you are in our hands, yet we do not want to kill you." Or "Thou knowest thou art in our hands, yet we do not desire to slay you." Pick one and stick with it. To alternate randomly shows ignorance. Like Twain said, JS wanted to sound churchy, but he couldn't help being the prole that he was, so his style inadvertently slipped into colloquialism, but then he'd try to pull it back to churchy again by dressing up certain forms, like ye and thou, but to make all the verbs match too would take a real stylist, which JS certainly was not.

Even when you get through the bad, uneven style, you're left contemplating the empty, even ridiculous content. If you actually heard in a movie, "Ye know ye are in our hands, yet we do not desire to slay you," could help but snort out loud? And then if someone told you it was a scripture, how could you be anything but incredulous? It's a scripture of what? What's it supposed to mean?

I also think that, possibly due to Germanic influence/origins of English, the verb/noun/verb sentence structure would make that "...yet we do not desire to slay you" into "...yet desire we not to slay you."

Also more poetic and takes up less space on the "plates"! :-)

And yet, I'll bet there other places in the BoM that get this structure right; I'm off to the given to peruse...or re-peruse...

Bottom line, god should have known how to push the idea through the stone in the hat in a grammatically correct and consistent format!

The Most Correct Book My Ass!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/20/2015 11:31AM by moose.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/20/2015 06:07PM by beyondashadow.

When I began a study of the BOM from a critical, scholarly point of view, I found pretty quickly that the style was an artifice, a poor attempt to copy the biblical sound of the KJV. Then I obtained text from the original first edition.. That was even worse! It included jargon that was obviously early upper New York "hick-speak." Like "They were a-coming," etc. It became ever more obvious that the text was a fabrication of some poorly educated yokels.

rationalist01 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> When I began a study of the BOM from a critical,
> scholarly point of view, I found pretty quickly
> that the style was an artifice, a poor attempt to
> copy the biblical sound of the KJV. Then I
> obtained text from the original first edition..
> That was even worse! It included jargon that was
> obviously early upper New York "hick-speak." Like
> "They were a-coming," etc. It became ever more
> obvious that the text was a fabrication of some
> poorly educated yokels.


kudos for your scholarship is what I was a-thinkin

... "Reformed 18th Century King James Hickspeak"

Conclusion: God's first language was not English and the last time he boned up on his English was in the 1700s. Now I know why I never finished reading the BOM.

I art thourn
Ye art minth
Thee art what thee are

I yam what I yam, and that's all what I yam. Thus saith the Lord.