Looking Over vs. Overlooking: Native American Languages: Let's Void the Void

Authors

Brian D. Stubbs, College of Eastern Utah-San Juan Campus

Keywords

Ancient Near East, Language, Book of Mormon, History, Mesoamerica, Civilization, Language, Modern Church, Scholarship

Abstract

The time-depth of the Romance language family (ca. 2,000 years) yields an abundance of similarities among languages descended from Latin: Spanish, French, Italian, and so forth. The time-depth of Lehi is not much greater (2,600 years), yet no similar abundance of accepted linguistic evidence for Lehi’s presence in the Americas has emerged. Is this because of a lack of evidence or a lack of looking? We cannot know until we look. The relative absence of effort in Native American languages relevant to Book of Mormon research is a huge void in Latter-day Saint scholarly endeavor. This paper discusses the value of and need to void this existing void, and presents from one Native American language family an example of the possibilities.

BYU ScholarsArchive Citation

Stubbs, Brian D. (1996) "Looking Over vs. Overlooking: Native American Languages: Let's Void the Void," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies: Vol. 5: No. 1, Article 1.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/vol5/iss1/1