Immediately after giving up on that wild goose chase, I checked William Wright's blog and found a new post: "'What ship will bear you back across so wide a sea?'" William is a believer in the Book of Mormon and often posts about it, but this one is mainly a Tolkien post. William writes, "There are two songs or poems associated with Galadriel that I will write out here," and then proceeds to do so.
The first poem begins thus:
I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold, and leaves of gold there grew:
The second poem is the familiar Namarie, parts of which I can probably quote from memory in the original Elvish (an exception to my otherwise sketchy memory of a book I've only read a few times). William quotes the English translation, explicitly identifying it as such: "It was said that Frodo couldn't understand the words, but Tolkien gives us the English translation right after." The opening lines are:
Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind,long years numberless as the wings of trees!
Both of these poems are obviously referring to tree leaves, not to the leaves of a book, and William clearly has no thought of connecting them with the golden plates of Joseph Smith. Still, it's quite a coincidence running into these two references to "leaves of gold" immediately after trying to find out how many "leaves of gold" Smith translated. When the second poem says "long years numberless as the wings of trees" (yeni unotime ve ramar aldaron, right?), "wings of trees" is clearly a kenning for the leaves mentioned in the first line -- the long years are numberless, just as leaves of gold are numberless. This is a pretty strong sync with my failed attempt to number some leaves of gold. William's emphasis on the fact that the poem is presented by Tolkien as an English translation from an otherwise unknown language also syncs in a general way with Joseph Smith's plates.
Now I'll go back and give that post a proper read; I'm afraid I was distracted as soon as I saw the leaves of gold.
9 comments:
You might be able to back into an estimate (a very loose one, but at least giving you an order of magnitude or something) based on Ether's plates. It was said there were 24 of them, and Moroni pulled his abridgement of the Jaredite history from those records, saying that the record contained a pretty comprehensive record of Creation all the way down Ether's time
Moroni left out the Creation account and history up to the destruction of the Great Tower (likely Numenor), which likely took up a material chunk of those 24 plates. It might have also included at least a version of the Brother of Jared's writings, but unclear I think.
Moroni abridged the remaining post-Tower record into what is now the "Book of Ether". In concluding that book, Moroni said that his abridgement is only a small fraction of what Ether wrote (less than a 'hundredth part').
I suppose, though, in thinking more on it, that if Ether is using a different script in his own writing than what Mormon and Moroni used, then you would have to assume that the 'information density' of those scripts is similar or else using Ether's 24 plates as a comparison wouldn't be helpful.
I'd assumed something similar -- that, in the absence of any other information, we can assume the BoM plates numbered something more like 24 than like the 592 pages of the English translation -- and that Laban's plates were presumably in the same ballpark in terms of number.
I don't think numbers of that order of magnitude are consistent with these "plate" records consisting of any ordinary language engraved on sheet metal in an ordinary way. Some quite different technology seems to be implied, and I'm trying to come up with a plausible working hypothesis about that.
I believe the approximate weight of the gold plates is known (50 lbs), and from that you can make a reasonable guess of the surface area, once converted into a thin sheet.
The Book of Mormon has a lot of repetition built into it:
1. Low information phrases that are often repeated such as 'It came to pass'.
2. Repeated phrase with modification - such as: X would do AB&C. X did do AB&C.
3. Repeated stories, such as the Zeniffite history being told us, then a summary being told us again, as recounted to Mosiah's scouts.
and others, this is just off the top of my head.
I estimate the Book of Mormon could be 5-10% shorter without this, which makes me curious if this wasn't a product of how it was encoded. Manual engraving would have cut the repetition down a lot more IMO. But perhaps this is an artifact of translation.
I wonder if Joseph's "Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language" could be helpful in giving an example of the technology and what is possible with a limited amount of space?
https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/grammar-and-alphabet-of-the-egyptian-language-circa-july-circa-november-1835/7
Not much of the explanation around "degrees" and "connecting parts of speech" makes a great deal of sense to me, but they might to you (you are the linguist).
From what I gather, it seems that one character can contain exponentially more 'parts of speech' for each line added to it, based on placement. The example Joseph gives is of one character that normally has 5 "parts of speech", adding 3 horizontal lines gives you 625 of these speech parts (5x5^3). Depending on what is meant by these additional parts of speech, it seems a whole lot of density of meaning or thought could be added to a single character by use of these degree multipliers or whatever they are.
How the works practically, or the brain power or other types of connectivity between people to make that all work and ensure what was conveyed is understood, I have no idea.
In fact it was in thinking about the complexity of these types of languages, and specifically scripts, that had me thinking of (and then unsuccessfully searching for) an older post of yours where you had a dream you were teaching some fairly complex older languages, one of them being "Greek" but not really Greek, or something like that. I looked for it but never found it.
It occurs to me that I'm assuming they were gold plates. The Book of Mormon itself doesn't say that. It does mention the 24 Jaredite plates were of pure gold, perhaps that was notable to them. The witnesses say the plates had the appearance of gold, but I suppose they could have been gilded.
Thanks for the comments, both of you.
I've read the Grammar and Alphabet several times and tried to make sense of it, but it remains opaque. Just from a data compression point of view, I don't think it is possible for a language to work that way.
The only way a few small marks can convey whole paragraphs of information is if they serve as a pointer to something else. For example, I can write something as brief as "Ps. 137" and successfully convey to many readers 165 English words worth of meaning -- but all that meaning is stored elsewhere, not in the marks themselves. Remote-viewing "coordinates" work that way, too, and Courtney Brown has done some interesting work on possible mechanisms behind that. I think it may be a fruitful avenue to explore in terms of making sense of the plates.
That remote 'storage' or reference idea is interesting - seems like a good thing to explore.
One idea came to my mind that might support the direction of your remote reference or meaning 'storage' idea. So, I am risking one more comment here - if it helps, great, if not, just ignore...
Remote storage or marks pointing to information contained elsewhere might also be able to explain how a language can be universally and almost immediately corrupted among a population.
Moroni's summary of Ether's history forces us to take some version of the story that language was corrupted as a something that actually happened. The Brother of Jared was asked to pray in order to avoid not being able to "understand [their] words". It is a strange phrase, but it might fit with your idea. If the meaning was stored elsewhere, all that needed to be done would be to cut off access to where or how that was referenced - the words would literally lose their meaning.
I hate to use a computer example, but if I had file path that when I clicked on took me to a file stored on a USB key, if I took away that key, or restricted access to it, I could no longer access the content or meaning of where that path was meant to take me. It would be a useless file symbol on my screen. Similarly, the people whose language was corrupted could still see the symbols, they would have just lost access to where that symbol was directing them to retrieve the meaning.
What if the whole business of words on the plates is a red herring and it actually all works something like:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MemoryJar
"This trope is when an object becomes imbued with the memories of a character, allowing others to gain these memories in a Pensieve Flashback or Exposition Beam. The "Jar" may be single use or reusable, and while it is often made intentionally either as an awesome form of journaling or diary keeping, it's entirely possible for it to be made unintentionally. In those cases, it's probably a psychic or wizard using a form of touch-based Psychometry to find out the history of an item.
In some cases, the memory jar can potentially be a complete record of a character's memories, becoming both a biography and potentially a "restore point" if their memories are damaged or a clone has to imprinted.
Compare Soul Jar, Transferable Memory and Neuro-Vault."
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