What’s In a Name?

Two languages collide when new people invade an existing ecosphere. The flora and fauna have no existing names in the intruding language. In those situations, a common solution is to adapt known labels to apply to the new plants and animals. Sorenson therefore notes: “What a Nephite ‘horse’ a specimen of our Equus equus? When they saw Spanish horses, the Aztecs called them ‘the Spaniards’ deer,’ wile to Europeans, small Mexican brocket deer were considered ‘goats.’ In the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the tapir was called ‘once an ass.’ These examples show the difficulty of translating the names of unfamiliar beasts.”

The same process occurred with plants. In King James English, corn was a generic term for grain. When friendly Indians introduced maize to English speakers along the Atlantic seaboard, the British called it corn, recontextualizing it to differentiate it from wheat. Now, four hundred years later, corn means maize to most English readers/speakers, and the generic meaning of corn as grain is fading into the realm of historical linguistics.

This process of linguistic adaptation is well understood and represents a plausible explanation for how a seemingly anachronistic term might end up in the Book of Mormon. While Mesoamericans might not have known a horse, the Lehites certainly did and it is therefore plausible that they used their traditional word horse to describe the unfamiliar animal. It was this process that gives us our name hippopotamus, which means river horse. Although it hardly seems horse-like, it was nevertheless given that appellation.

This known process explains the word horse in the Book of Mormon (as well as other anachronistic nouns) by suggesting that Joseph Smith accurately translated the Lehite/Nephite misapplication of a term inherited from the Old World and applied to a plant or animal in the New World. The acceptability of this particular explanation is directly related to one’s theory of the translation of the Book of Mormon. It requires a very literalist translation which preserved the Nephite cross-labeling.

Did the translation mislabeling occur with the Nephites or with Joseph? Certainly, the Middle Eastern Nephites (who knew hat horses looked like and what they were used for) might have mislabeled as “horses” the closest local quadrupeds that they found in the New world. However, retaining this mistaken label assumes that Hebrew continued to be their common language and that they continued to name local animals using Hebrew words. Those local animals already had names in the native languages; and if the Nephites adopted one of those languages as their lingua franca (preserving Hebrew as a sacred language), then there would have been no reason why they insisted on the mislabel (which would, at a minimum, have confused the local people and their own locally born children). For example, even English-speakers identify the Mesoamerican ocelot by the word derived from Aztec ocelotl. The ocelot is not mislabeled; it is known by a borrowed identification. Similarly, our very common words “chocolate” and “tomato” are derived from Aztec loan words: chocolatl and tomatl. I find it much more likely that anachronistic vocabulary such as “horse” is the result of the modern translator’s imposition of his language culture than that such words represent a literalistic translation of a Nephite cross-label.