Estimating the Evidence, Episode 19: On Uto-Aztecan

Intro/FAQ ⎜ Episode 1 ⎜ Episode 2 ⎜ Episode 3 ⎜ Episode 4 ⎜ Episode 5 ⎜ Episode 6 ⎜ Episode 7 ⎜ Episode 8 ⎜ Episode 9 ⎜ Episode 10 ⎜ Episode 11 ⎜ Episode 12 ⎜ Episode 13 ⎜ Episode 14 ⎜ Episode 15 ⎜ Episode 16 ⎜ Episode 17 ⎜ Episode 18 ⎜ Episode 19 ⎜ Episode 20 ⎜ Episode 21 ⎜ Episode 22 ⎜ Episode 23

[Editor’s Note: This is the nineteenth in a series of 23 essays summarizing and evaluating Book of Mormon-related evidence from a Bayesian statistical perspective. See the FAQ at the end of the introductory episode for details on methodology.]

The TLDR

It seems unlikely that the similarities we can observe between Egyptian/Semitic and Uto-Aztecan languages could have arisen by chance.

Few Book of Mormon-related discoveries have had as much impact or have generated as much controversy as Brian Stubbs’ proposal connecting Egyptian and Semitic with the Uto-Aztecan languages of northern Mexico and the southwest U.S. Highly credentialed experts have weighed in both for and against, but little has been done to definitively settle the question. Using a sample of 200 of Stubbs’ 1500+ correspondences, I do my best to estimate the likelihood of seeing those connections by chance. That likelihood appears to be quite low indeed. My analysis suggests that chance could produce as many as 235 correspondences out of 2700 identified proto-Uto-Aztecan words, corresponding to a 3% chance per word for each near-eastern language Stubbs attempts to compare them against. When limiting Stubbs’ proposal to only those correspondences that implicate proto-Uto-Aztecan, and whose meanings match exactly or near-exactly, and assuming that Stubbs himself has an error rate of 20%, I estimate that there’s a core set of 422 correspondences that meet those criteria. Though 422 might not seem like that much more than 235, the probability that Stubbs could have reached that many by chance is p = 6.99 x 10-15. As much as many might believe or wish otherwise, Stubbs’ work can’t be easily dismissed.

Evidence Score = 14 (increases the probability of an authentic Book of Mormon by 14 orders of magnitude).

The Narrative

When last we left you, our ardent skeptic, you had set aside your annoyance at the fallibility of so-called “prophets,” and you press on with the war and bloodshed that stains the book’s pages. You become weary enough of it that you take a moment and hold the book by its spine, keeping your place with a finger. Over two-thirds of the way through and yet you have no clue where this story is leading. Just conflict interspersed with the occasional sermon, like bittersweet raisins spread in a sour pie.

But you can’t sit long without sating your curiosity, and you again return to reading. To your near shock, within a chapter the war is over, and the narrative moves away from it almost immediately. In the wake of war there’s peace, and peace, apparently, begets boredom. An enigmatic character named Hagoth directs his boredom to building boats, and to convincing others to sail away from their homeland in order to settle the lands to the north.

You muse that Hagoth must have been an exceptionally talented con man to have convinced anyone to engage in that kind of insanity. Yet the travelers apparently returned, their voyage successful, with Hagoth sending additional rounds of settlers northward.

That sets your mind turning. Obviously these Nephites and Lamanites, if they existed, should have left their mark on the lands and culture surrounding them. But you wondered what sort of mark these expeditions might have had on whatever “northward” lands they sailed off to. You think about other voyages of settlement and conquest, and the effects that those had—the Spaniards who settled the Philippines, their language altering forever the Tagalog of the natives, or English being suffused with the Scandinavian of Viking hordes. Perhaps the key to discovering the truth of this book was in the languages of that northern land.

These thoughts echo within you, and not just metaphorically. You can actually hear the word “land” reverberate between your ears. But each time you hear it the word seems to change, as if it was being subtly shaped by the contours of your mind. Eventually the sound seems to converge into a different word entirely:

“daama”

Based on your past studies, you recognize it as the Hebrew word for “land.” But it doesn’t stay in that form for long. After a moment, it takes the form of yet another word:

“tima”

You don’t know how you know, but somehow you also recognize this word. It also meant “land,” but it wasn’t Hebrew. You see in your mind’s eye a land far to the west of your own New England, toward the western shores of northern Mexico. The word belonged to these people—not to those who lived there in the present, but to those who inhabited it anciently.

No. You think. This can’t be possible. But now the word “no” begins to echo, slowly transforming into another word.

“bi”

For a moment you don’t think you know the word, but then suddenly you do. It also means “no,” but the word was far more ancient than English, and had been spoken by the same people who had erected the pyramids of Egypt. But that word also changes into another, though the change is slight indeed.

“pi”

The way the “p” sound formed was only barely distinguishable from the previous “b.” You knew that this word, too, belonged to the indigenous people inhabiting the lands of northern Mexico.

As the echoes continue you sigh inwardly. This isn’t the first time the book had driven you mad. What have I done to be smitten with this malady? you think. But now the word “smitten” begins its echoic journey around your skull, the "s" and the "n" fading away, and the "I" and "tt" changing their shape:

“mukke”

This word is also Hebrew, yet strangely you know that it’s of a different sort, a Hebrew that had itself been influenced by the Jews’ Phoenician neighbors. As the echo continued it too stayed almost the same, but you could make out a minor difference:

“mukki”

In the moments that follow you seem to hear not just those words, but hundreds upon hundreds of others. Each word—whether Hebrew or Egyptian—would turn into another spoken by the ancient inhabitants of that area of the American continent. Sometimes the change would be subtle, other times it would be more significant, but always you could hear the ways that one changed into the other. As the cacophony of words finally begin to fade away, you mind calls back with unnatural clarity to words you had read at the beginning of the book, at what had been the second verse in the very first chapter:

Yea, I make a record in the language of my father, which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians.

As the verse finishes you throw the book down at the table so hard that you fear for the integrity of the table. With an urgency that approaches terror you push yourself up from your chair and storm out your door into the afternoon sun. You try hard, between heavy breaths, to regain your composure, but as your heartbeat slows and your lungs calm, a thought remains lodged in the front of your brain. If there really is a language in the Americas that appears to have been influenced so strongly by Hebrew and Egyptian, it seems unlikely that such similarities could have arisen by chance.

The Introduction

For the past couple hundred years linguists have been consistently dogged by a claim that, on its face, seems patently ridiculous—the idea that the languages of Indigenous peoples have been influenced by Hebrew, whether by descent or by contact. Though this claim has not been unique to Latter-Day Saints (it was believed by many Christians in early America that the New World had been home to the lost ten tribes), such evidence, if it existed, would have obvious implications for the authenticity of the Book of Mormon. Yet, as the decades passed, each claim of a connection to the Hebrew language was proven to be spurious, a fact that has left scholars increasingly and justifiably jaded with each new claim.

But in recent years a claim has arisen that is very difficult to dismiss out of hand. Brian Stubbs, a respected linguist and noted expert in the Uto-Aztecan language family, has spent the better part of four decades patiently collecting an apparent mountain of linguistic evidence showing just that kind of Hebrew connection. That evidence seems to indicate that, several thousand years ago, there was extensive contact between the languages of that family and a mix of Semitic and Egyptian—a mix that just happens to align with what the Book of Mormon would predict for its peoples. This evidence uses the same general methods that linguists would use to establish relationships between different languages, and the volume of that evidence does indeed appear to be impressive, with over 1,500 detailed word correspondences connecting the Old and New World languages.

Unsurprisingly, Stubbs’ claims have not gone unchallenged. A number of linguists have been intrigued by his claims and satisfied with his methods, but others have not. In each case the critics have maintained that it would be possible to see that many correspondences by chance, particularly given the number of languages that Stubbs has drawn from to create his language sets. Unfortunately, the math underlying that assertion has, so far, been sub-par. And that, hopefully, is where Bayes can come in. Bayesian analysis is just the sort of tool that could serve to resolve this dispute, though the linguistic nuances involved make this by far the most challenging problem we’ve tackled so far.

The Analysis

The Evidence

There’s not much point trying to summarize the evidence, since it’s already been done so ably. If you don’t want to bash your head against Stubbs’ own extensive 400 page analysis (from which I’ve pulled the data I’m using here), you could take a look at his more accessible book, or read/watch his 2016 FairMormon Conference talk. You could also sample Jeff Lindsay’s summary in Interpreter, or the positive reviews from two separate BYU linguists.

But if you wanted an elevator pitch, here it is: there are many, many, many words that appear, to an extent, shared between Egyptian and Semitic on one side and the 61 languages that make up the Uto-Aztecan language family on the other, whose speakers were centered in northern Mexico and the American southwest, including the Pacific coasts of those areas. It is worth noting that these areas would be conspicuously accessible to seafaring migrants moving northward from the Pacific side of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Here’s a map, in case you’re curious:

Now, as you might expect, not all of those correspondences are perfect matches. But the differences aren’t just random—they point to consistent changes in sound that make sense given how languages commonly shift, such as changes from b sounds to p sounds, or l sounds to r sounds. And, according to Stubbs, the connections with Egyptian and Semitic help solve a number of mysteries that scholars of Uto-Aztecan had been trying to solve for years.

Over the last couple years there have been two key critiques of Stubbs’ work. The first is a paper from Chris Rogers, a linguist at BYU publishing in the Journal of Mormon Studies. His key argument (and the only one with real force) is that because Stubbs made use of multiple related languages in his search for correspondences (i.e., multiple Semitic languages, and, of course, the many different languages of Uto-Aztecan), he was fishing in too large of a pool—if you search enough words in enough languages, you will unavoidably find words with similar meaning that sound the same. Rogers even included a rather ill-advised table attempting to demonstrate this idea, one that makes some terrible assumptions, including that each of the languages are independent of each other (they, of course, aren’t independent, since they’re in the same language family). But despite Rogers’ error, he does have a point—searching in more languages would indeed lead to more false correspondences.

The second critique came from Magnes Hansen, a fellow Uto-Aztecan expert specializing in the Nahuatl language. Hansen took a look at 14 correspondences relating to his specific language of expertise, and came away mostly unimpressed, arguing that the correspondences aren’t as good or as proper as Stubbs seems to claim. Stubbs has since responded to both Rogers and Hansen in-depth in this article.

In this analysis, I can’t say much about whether those correspondences are proper—whether they follow the rules of linguistic analysis. All I’ll be able to do here is try to determine whether they’re expected—whether we could get a similar result just by examining any comparable set of unrelated languages.

But first, the hypotheses.

The Hypotheses

Linguistic correspondences with Uto-Aztecan are due to contact with Book of Mormon peoples—With this theory, the linguistic correspondences observed by Stubbs can be most readily explained by contact between Uto-Aztecan speakers and the people’s described in the Book of Mormon, peoples who would have been speaking just such a hybrid of Egyptian and Semitic, and who would have been traveling the the coasts of Mexico and California at around the right time-depth to have influenced the appropriately ancient form of Uto-Aztecan.

Linguistic correspondences with Uto-Aztecan are due to chance—This theory posits that the correspondences found by Stubbs could appear by chance—that by looking at enough words and enough languages, eventually Stubbs was bound to find words in Egyptian and Semitic that appeared similar to Uto-Aztecan languages just on the basis of random variation, and that this can happen with any set of languages.

Prior Probabilities

PH—Prior Probability of Linguistic Contact—Given the various types of evidence we’ve considered up to this point, we’re very much obliged to give Stubbs’ proposal the benefit of the doubt, with a prior probability of p = 1 – 2.07 x 10-19. As always, here’s a review of where we’ve been so far:

PA—Prior Probability of Chance-Based Correspondence—Despite the slight boost provided by the prophetic errors outlined in the previous episode, our prior for the critical hypothesis is an anemic 2.07 x 10-19.

Consequent Probabilities

CH—Consequent Probability of Linguistic Contact—Our first job is to figure out how likely we would be to see Stubbs’ correspondences if his theory was correct, which, thank heaven, is a mercifully simple task. Out of all the criticisms leveled at Stubbs’ work, never have any of them said “no, this can’t be contact, because contact doesn’t look like this.” Part of that, I suspect, is that contact could essentially look like anything. There’s no verse in the Book of Mormon that says “lo, and Hagoth’s settlers landed, and had just enough contact to product 300 linguistic correspondences and no more.” There could’ve been a lot of contact or there could’ve been a little. Based on what Stubbs explains, that contact appears to be relatively extensive, with correspondences covering a substantial proportion of the language. But I see no basis in the evidence itself to rule out the type of contact we’re considering. I’ll be assigning a consequent probability of p = 1.

CA—Consequent Probability of Modern Authorship—Our much more difficult task will be evaluating the idea that such correspondences could arise from chance. As noted above, the initial effort from Rogers is of little use to us. He does reference the idea that we might expect between 1% and 3% of correspondences between any two related languages to have arisen by chance (for which he cites Stubbs!), but that doesn’t tell us much about what we’d expect from Stubbs’ correspondences, or from these particular languages. That chance could well be lower (or higher) for the correspondences at which Stubbs was actually looking. If we’re serious about getting this right, that means taking a hard look at the correspondences that Stubbs actually reports.

This thought didn’t exactly fill me with glee, given the breadth and density of Stubbs’ full report. So, I did what any hot-blooded experimental social psychologist would do: I took a random sample.

In particular, I randomly selected 200 of Stubbs’ 1,528 correspondences (I used the RANDBETWEEN function in Excel in 200 cells—if a number was picked twice I altered it to be the previous number), keeping track of a variety of information for each. For both the Old World word in the correspondence (which I termed the “source") and the Uto-Aztecan word (which I termed the “target”), I entered the specific language the word came from, the meaning of the word, the number of consonant-level sounds, and what those sounds were, associating each sound in the source word with the corresponding sounds in the target word (which would let me keep track of whether or not each sound matched). Since the Hebrew and Egyptian words often lacked vowels, vowel sounds were generally excluded. You can take a look at the appendix for the full table, if you have the requisite courage.

WARNING: We’re about to get very deep in the weeds here—if that sort of thing makes you squeamish (or bored) you may want to look away now. I’ll let you know when it’s safe to pay attention again.

Based on that table, I could estimate a few things about Stubbs’ correspondences, things that should generalize pretty well to the full set. The first was the sounds themselves and how they correspond. One thing that’s hard to get a sense of from just reading through Stubbs’ sets is just how well the words match. Some of them match very well, with a substantial number of sounds lining up well with little variation. Others share only a sound or two, with some of the target words adding sounds not found in the source or missing some of the source sounds. From the table below, though, we can see that about half (54%) of the sounds in the source are a match for the ones in the target, with another 14% having similar sounds that Stubbs posits could have shifted systematically over time. However, a number of others were either not matching or had been dropped (16% each). You can take a look at that in the table below:

Source Sound

Matching

Similar

Not Matching

Dropped

Total

% of Source Sounds

‘

‘ (6)

w (8)

14

8

36

6.4%

?

w (9)

6

5

20

3.5%

b

b (5)

p (21)

kw v(5)

3

6

40

7.1%

d

d or t (17)

7

2

26

4.6%

f

2

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