Talk:Linguistics and the Book of Mormon

message: This post is concerning this edit.  It reintroduces WP:FALSEBALANCE and WP:YESPOV issues by misrepresenting scientific consensus as the opinion of particular critics and suggesting that some legitimate science is apparently being done on the topic by "Mormon scientists and historians": ("rejected by non-Latter Day Saint historians and scientists", "Critics of the Book of Mormon"), etc.  —PaleoNeonate – 14:21, 20 September 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: The new language seems accurate. It seems more NPOV to say "these people think this language shows this book is fake" than "this language shows this book is fake" when that dispute is the whole subject of the article. I think if you want to convince the reader of the legitimacy of the critiques, just make sure the article represents all the evidence and explanations of that POV fairly. -- Beland (talk) 03:08, 24 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  False balance 

message: The below for discussion and reference creation to the stylometry "word print" parts of the article.
To sum everything up simply, the Book of Nephi and the Book or Alma have distinctive character voices. Since the dawn of writing, authors have been able to write stories, plays, etc with distinctive voices for each character. Obviously, an author can use the phrase “and it came to pass” repeatedly for Nephi and only a couple of times for Alma, which is what occurs. Different character or different author? Nearly impossible to say with the limited data we have. Statistics and math will produce results according to the assumptions you input to them.
LDS (Mormon) scholars performed the first stylometry studies of the Book of Mormon. They sought to prove their worldview by demonstrating multiple authors of the Book of Mormon. The idea being if there were multiple authors, then Joseph Smith could not have been THE author. Therefore divinity actually beamed the various author translations to his head, or so goes the predetermined conclusion.
Almost immediately, there was a retort study showing a single author to the Book of Mormon and that author was also the author of the the Doctrine and Covenants. Since those two studies followed constant back and forth stylometry studies. Why the constant contradicting studies? Stylometry is just another form of pattern matching. All pattern matching can be tuned for false positives and false negatives.
Undoubtedly all parties agree the Book of Mormon was written in the style of the King James Version Bible. Undoubtedly all parties agree there are multiple character voices in the Book of Mormon. Therefore, if a 19th century person (or multiple persons) wrote the Book of Mormon, everyone agrees that person would be hiding their voice behind at least two masks, one of the KJV style and the other of the multiple fictitious characters.
Think of Dana Carvey impersonating real people like George Bush (41) or Mr. Rogers and then his fictional creation the Church Lady. Currently, there is no statistical method to identify the underlying voice of Dana Carvey conclusively or without pre-knowledge of the voice you are looking for, so anyone that attempts to state that stylometry proves this or that, is wrong. Furthermore, whenever Mormons find a stylometry study unfavorable they readily reject it as voice of the translator, creating a falsifiability problem. Creating a scenario where stylometry studies cannot falsify therefore creates one they cannot verify either, capitulating on the stylometry game they started.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mormon/comments/ig6h80/analysis_of_authorship_in_each_book_in_the_book/g2u1nwg/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/vocal-disguises-and-impersonations-may-fool-voice-recognition-authentication/
https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/IAAI/IAAI09/paper/viewFile/257/1017
“Our results showing that stylometry methods are weak against trivial attacks [which] should have an impact on how such evidence is weighed.”
Summary: “when an author attempts to imitate another author, accuracy for identification drops dramatically. From this, I conclude that because the Book of Mormon was written in a KJV-style biblical English, standard wordprint methodology would likely not find matches with the possible 19th century candidates, even if they did write it.”
This all goes to the bigger question of identity. There is no, and probably never will be, a rigorous mathematical definition of identity. Best methods for identity verification is to use multiple variables of statistical closeness to compared to prior samples 65.210.47.163 (talk) 01:40, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stylometry 

message: Jan 3, 2024 - How is the statement "...or never existed" allowed to remain on this page?  In October 1841, Joseph Smith placed the original manuscript in the southeast cornerstone of the Nauvoo House. 40 years later, 28 percent of the original manuscript was recovered, (the rest was water damaged) scanned at high resolution and published early in 2022  --- Considering the amount of time/ink invested on Mr. Stubb's publication credentials... the disregard for this obvious"oversight" seems, at best, highly questionable.
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.52.4.156 (talk) 23:54, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: If you read the next sentence following that statement you'll see the "claimed original text" existence of which is not established refers to the source text supposed translation of which the extant "original manuscript" is. – MwGamera (talk) 20:36, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  ...or never existed