Talk:Alma 54:1-5

From Feast upon the Word (http://feastupontheword.org). Copyright, Feast upon the Word.

Mmatheson wrote:

v 3. shows an apparent limitation of the Nephite language. Unlike English, where we use apostrophes (Nephi’s prisoner) or an adjective before a word (Nephite prisoner), Mormon’s sole way of describing ownership or possession was by the use of “of the” as in the “prisoners of the Nephites.” But this poses a problem because then we are unsure of whether he meant Nephites were the prisoners of the Lamanites or Lamanites were prisoners of the Nephites.

With this language structure limitation in verse 3 Mormon was left with a very awkward way to describe the prisoners. So in the first part of the verse, he used an additional phrase to clarify: “or the prisoners whom Moroni had taken.” And then in the second part of the verse he added “from the Lamanites” to clarify “prisoners of the Nephites” because to the normal reader “prisoners of the Nephites” tends to imply the Nephites were the guards and not the captives, which his clarify phrase explains was not the case.--Mmatheson 17:30, 2 Jun 2006 (UTC)

Hi Mmatheson, I have two questions on this. 1) no doubt there were a lot of things different about the Nephit language than our own, but it seems odd to me that we would expect this kind of difference between the language to be preserved. 2) The second question I have is about why "of the" is a reflection of the language here when in other cases an apostrophe s is used to reflect the language. Alma 59:1 is a good example of the use of apostrophe s. Here are some additional examples: father's, shoe's, name’s sake, Solomon's, mother's, Lord's, fuller’s, Remaliah’s son. There are more but I got sick of transcribing them. Here] is a search for them. --Matthew Faulconer 15:38, 4 Jun 2006 (UTC)