Dave Mee wrote:
> The book of Mormon is much more fun. I love asking if in
> chapter 8, "the Book of Moroni", it's just an unfortunate
> name, or a plural form.
I'm not sure what you mean with chapter 8. Chapter 8 of the book of Moroni
that's one of the sections that are called books inside the Book of Mormon?
And Moroni is a name, not a plural form. If you want unfortunate, there's
also a King called Moron, without a final I; he was a Jaredite. Read a brief
account about him in Ether 11:14-18 (for example, at
http://scriptures.lds.org/ether/11#14 ); Ether is the second-to-last book in
the Book of Mormon (right before Moroni, since we were talking about him).
> And whether the fact that 50% of sentences in the book
> beginning with "And lo, it came to pass" is just bad translation
> from the original Angel, or anticipatory post-post irony from
> pre-ironic days.
It's a translation from Hebrew, which is the language the Book of Mormon is
said to have been written in. The Hebrew form is "vayhi" or "vayyehi" or
something like that. (The most common form of the phrase in the Book of
Mormon is "And it came to pass", without the "lo".) An explanation I have
heard is that Semitic prose was written without full stops or commas; fixed
phrases such as this one served to introduce a new idea and hence were
roughly the equivalent of a sentence-ending full stop. Nobody seems to care
that there are lots of little dots splattered around English prose, but the
expression "And it came to pass" does seem quaint to Western ears.
> I'd swap recruiters for mormons any day of the week.
I'm not a recruiter :-)
Cheers,
Philip
