Raf

A Time To Kill a Mockingbird

And there's no z in brassiere! Nice quotes, George.

No one is a number, Chockfull. I was trying to make a sweeping generalization that no one intended to practice any kind of deception, even assuming I'm right. That includes you, even if my typical history missed you by a mile. Ham, it was not the bet: it was the self reflection. It should have happened a lot sooner, but you know how Allan could never SIT before he was saved? (yes he could, but why would anyone who's not saved try it?) Same thing. I never saw any reason to confront my SIT so long as I was continually encouraged and reinforced in my own self deception. It took a catalyst to get me to question it. The rest is really not much more than projection and extrapolation based at first on a presumption that no one was producing real languages and now on a tad more evidence.

I think my description of first time SIT was typical of the TWI experience, as little as it applies to you, chockfull.

We're not really disagreeing much. I'll let it go. It's an indicator. By itself, it proves nothing. Frank Purdue had a terrific Spanish vocabulary and a lousy accent. But you knew it was Spanish. If all these tongues speakers were producing languages, Samarin would have had nothing to study. If any produced a real language, I think it's reasonable to suggest he would have mentioned it while he was laying down the difference between xenoglossy and glossolalia. Instead, he observes (after study, not before) that all glossolalia samples he reviewed were not language.

Joking aside, I want to be clear I am accusing no one of being evil or even of deliberately lying. I think we all got sold a bill of goods and we all were talked out of a reasonable skepticism at the earliest possible stage. We wanted to believe it. We believed it was God's Will. We were encouraged by everyone around us (whether they were literally around us or there "in spirit") and we were actively discouraged from doubting. We supported each other, congratulated each other, fed off each other. (Now who's doing the psychoanalyzing? Sue me). But when I knew I could walk down the street and speak in tongues and get $1 million from a guy who was looking for proof of the supernatural, the jig was up. I knew I'd never see a dime because I knew in my heart what I had done and, these many years later, I finally confronted it. That's my experience. I knew all along, but I could always avoid the confrontation because, after all, who was confronting me? No one. I had to confront myself. So if I'm wrong, and this free vocalization really is Biblical SIT... Crap, I'm out $1 million!

The problem that I have is that Biblical SIT is a real human language and what's produced today is not. Disagree with me on either side of that, and there's nothing to debate because we can't agree on a basic foundation. Clearly Chockfull and I disagree on the first premise (real SIT is a real human language) and likely we disagree on the second (what's produced today is not). He's being polite enough to examine the second without addressing the first, which is at heart a doctrinal premise. In my opinion, SIT has the meaning you bring to it: no objective meaning. There is nothing to interpret. Interpretations are from the heart of the speaker, and seeing as there's no way to prove or disprove divine inspiration there, it's not really worth debating. Widespread but not universal fakery has already been admitted by most on this thread on both sides of the debate. Glad we could keep it civil this time, Chockfull.

It's not that you can remember the language itself or the words. Just remembering the sounds is enough to give you something to inject into your SIT experience. I do not use the CH sound as in Chanukkah in my normal vocabulary, but I could use it in tongues because I've been exposed to the sound. I don't even know how to spell the Arabic sounds I heard, but I heard them enough to imitate them, and as long as I could do that, I could use them in tongues. It's supernatural proof of absolutely nothing. But ask me to repeat what I heard in Mongolian today (I don't know if that's the name of their language), and I couldn't do it. Expose me to it a few more times and I might. My ability to turn around and use it in SIT would not validate the SIT. Only my creativity. I see the page you're talking about as far as English and accents. It should be noted that he put the word "accent" in quotes and he did not mean it in the same way as you and I talk about British accents or Southern accents. He was speaking there as a linguist: the use of exclusively English phonemes gives him away as a native English speaker. He's talking about one guy. The section where he talks about other language phonemes talks hypothetically, and quite reasonably I think, about how someone may come to the table with more than one set of phonemes to work with.

Samarin studied samples of glossolalia from all around the world, so naturally he would find phonemes from the various languages represented by the speakers. Not sure I'm getting your objection there. SITters are derivative in their use of basic sounds but innovative in how they combine them: exactly what I would expect of someone making up something with the intent of making it sound like a language. Am I missing something? That is not a leap at all! It is a perfectly logical explanation. As a tongues speaker, I had the following to work with: English, Spanish, smatterings of French, Hebrew and Greek (not a lot, as little as the rest of us had through TWI exposure) and Arabic (not any knowledge of the actual language, but an ability to imitate sounds made by the workers at various stores near where I lived and worked). All of those could inform my tongues language. It really doesn't take much. Today I met a bunch of Mongolians. The sounds that came from their mouths as they spoke their native language was NOTHING like ANYTHING I ever heard in SIT. But, if it makes you feel any better, it sounded like gibberish to me. ;)

By the way, tell me if I'm mistaken here, but he discredits all the xenoglossia claims presented to him.

That's a pretty big assumption that he made up his mind prior to his research. But there may be SOME merit to that. Nonetheless, had he found xenoglossia, he would have noted it. I mean, why go into a page or two of really small type on the distinction between xenoglossia and glossolalia and fail to point out that 0.5 percent of the samples you studied were xenoglossic? Makes no sense. He didn't do it because he didn't find any such examples. I finally understood what he meant by xenoglossia not being interesting to the linguist: If a tongues speaker produced an actual language, the linguist has nothing to study. He simply declares it Swahili and leaves it to someone else to figure out what the devil just happened. Glossolalia gives him something to study. And what he's studying appears very much to be the end product of free vocalization. As for his xenoglossia examples, I don't think he's making anywhere near the leap you're making. No sample of SIT that he studied produced a language. That's as far as we can take Samarin, as far as I ever intended to take him.

Ah, NOW you're talking! Here's the thing: if he said it was LIKE real language in limited ways, that it shared some characteristics with language, but did not articulate what those ways and characteristics were, would you not fairly criticize him for holding back? [Poythress, if you read him carefully, holds back some stuff that might have proved helpful to your argument. It's impossible to tell where he was going with it, and I'm trying to find it myself when I have time. You'll have to trust me on that]. Thing is, I think he DOES explain why the phonetics don't lead him to conclude it's a language. The limited number of phonemes, the fact that they all come from the speaker's native language, the fact that they are lacking in variety compared to real languages (but have much more variety than gibberish). I think you're selling him short.

I don't fully agree with you, Waysider, but you make a point that needs to be expanded upon: In other places, Samarin calls the utterances "word-like" and "sentence-like." Again, these findings are consistent with the explanation that the speaker WANTS it to sound like a language and injects those qualities into the utterance. It proves nothing as to actual language content. Samarin is impressed by human creativity, not by the "language" that's produced. He says so explicitly more than once.

Yeah, this has become the Chockfull and Raf examine Samarin show, hasn't it. But I appreciate the challenge and I think Chockfull does, too, wherever it may lead either of us.

You edited before I posted. My original reply: Fair enough. But we can't say that Samarin is calling it a real $2 bill just because he's impressed by the quality of the ink. We have to agree that his findings are his findings. I can't address your challenge to his bias. But I don't think it's fair or right to suggest that his conclusions are inconsistent with the linguistic qualities of glossolalia when he explicitly accounts for them. My edited reply: Naturally, I do not agree that Samarin is concluding 5 as the sum of 2+2. That oversimplifies his work. He's saying it's good ink, good paper, good artistry. You might even pass it off to an untrained cashier. But it's still not a real $2 bill.

THAT one qualifies!

Duly noted, and I think you've been clear about that all along. As far as SIT, we're debating on the merits. As far as Interpretation and Prophecy, the dynamic is a little more interesting: even though there's simply no way on God's green earth to either validate or discredit a spiritual energizing of either practice, we still have a consensus that fakery was widespread, though no consensus that it was faked every time by everyone. Truly unprovable and untestable and not even worth asserting for that reason. Just because you call them inconsistencies doesn't make them inconsistencies. They're not. He says they're not languages and they're only like languages in limited ways with some characteristics. He explains those ways and characteristics. That's consistent. It doesn't change the conclusion that it's not a genuine $2 bill. You can CALL it inconsistent all you want, but that don't make it so.

You keep calling Samarin inconsistent. That is not true. Samarin is wholly consistent. He tells you, for example: When he articulates those very limited ways and some of the characteristics, some opportunistic apologists point to it as proof it really IS some kind of language and accuse him of being inconsistent. He never said glossolalia has no linguistic qualities. That doesn't make it a $2 bill. It needs to be noted that Lovekin (of Malony and Lovekin) was (is?) a tongues speaker. That he would take a quote from Samarin out of context to have him say the opposite of what he is clearly saying doesn't necessarily surprise me. But not having read their book, I can't pick it apart any more than that. They're also, if I recall correctly, not linguists. So I'm still looking for a single case of a linguist disputing Samarin's findings (we went from his own linguists disagreeing with him to Sherrill quoting him unfavorably to, now, no linguists challenging him. Let me know when you find one, or if I'm mistaken about Malony and Lovekin). Then we're in disagreement, but I submit it's not pivotal to either of our cases. Agree?

Actually, we're both reading into this a bit. When I read into it, I see Samarin saying that glossolalia reveals the subconscious effort of the speaker to produce a language, where gibberish does not. Interestingly, earlier in his study he appears to reject a sample of SIT as NOT glossolalia because it was clearly gibberish, although he doesn't quite say it that way (I'm referring to page 51, in case you want to know what I'm referring to).

Jumping ahead to address this one specifically: the unusual thing about Acts was not that it was a human language, but that it was human languages spoken and understood by those present. Nothing in Acts or Corinthians indicates that the word "tongues," which means "languages," suddenly means something more cryptic that becomes the norm rather than the exception. I have seen efforts to reinterpret the scriptures in this regard to broaden the definition to include "unknown" languages and exclude "known" languages, but I see no reason to force this view onto scripture written 2,000 years earlier. It seems to me more like a retroactive attempt to explain why SIT always fails to produce a real language. In effect, we're broadening the definition of salt to include sugar and exclude salt.

I think you're simplifying him in a manner that is not entirely accurate. I do believe he is referring to the quality of the language itself, and not merely the usage by the speaker. He writes: He goes on to explore the issue in depth on page 59 and 60, and I believe the upshot of what he says is that it conveys whatever meaning the speaker wants it to convey. Read the section and tell me if you disagree. The words themselves don't mean anything in the objective sense, but the speaker may impart such meanings while thinking of or recalling certain things, people or ideas (ie, "Could you speak in tongues for me? I'm going through a rough time.") The fact that we are able to do this has exactly zero supernatural implications and remains consistent with the entire experience being a case of sincere free vocalization carried out in a worship setting.

There's plenty of work out there on non-Christian glossolalia to keep you busy. Clearly it's not the same thing we're talking about in terms of worship. But here's an interesting question to consider, with no bearing on the questions raised by this thread: ever wonder where the Corinthians got so many bad ideas about what to do with glossolalia in the first place?

Ok, back at a computer. I'm going to tackle this a few pieces at a time because a comprehensive response would be overwhelming. I do have a job. ;) Already noted: this is not true. Sherrill did not quote Samarin. Landry did. That is correct. But it's also significant to note that Samarin specifically distinguishes glossolalia from xenoglossia, the speaking of an actual language to which the speaker has no previous exposure or knowledge. This is significant to us because it is the heart of my position: all SIT should be xenoglossia. That is, it should produce an actual language. I have stated before that if we do not agree there, a meaningful discussion becomes rather moot. Clearly, we do not agree there, so in a lot of ways this conversation ended before it began. I believe the Bible is very clear that the expectation would be a real language, not something with language-like features that can be generated subconsciously by a speaker free-vocalizing on the spot. You are entitled to disagree with my expectation there, so long as we're clear on it. Everything Samarin says about glossolalia is colored by the finding that it is not xenoglossia: not an actual existing language. When he examines glossolalia, he is no different from an expert in the field examining the characteristics of a counterfeit $2 bill. No matter how much he praises the artistry, ink or paper, he is already certain he is not dealing with the genuine article. It's a fake. How good a fake is it? How good is the ink? How good is the paper? How much does it resemble the real thing? All worth reviewing, but the answers don't suddenly make this stuff money. Then immediat You left out the part where he makes it quite clear that these resemblances to real language are superficial (that's HIS word, not mine). Just Google Samarin and Superficial, and the references pop up all over the place: (all emphases are mine) He is not merely writing about the speaker's communicative intent. He's discussing the utterance in a systematic, qualitative way. It's not a language. Back to chockfull: Yes, a superficial resemblance brought to the glossa by the speaker. Nothing remarkable there: When I spoke in tongues, I wanted it to sound like a language. Samarin tells us that we succeed at producing something that has a superficial resemblance to language. That doesn't make it a language! It makes us creative. Again, false. Sherrill did no such thing. And the only thing I can say about Landry's use of Malony and Lovekin's quote of Samarin is that it appears to be cherry-picking of the highest order. You cannot talk about Samarin's findings of the linguistic qualities of glossolalia while divorcing it from his findings that it's not language and that it only resembles language in superficial ways. Ah! If you want to question his bias, I can't stop you there. It's more than just questionable. It is fundamentally not language. Again, I credit Samarin with putting his work out there for all to see, review and critique. But I don't agree that the examination should be used to get him to say the opposite of what he's saying. Another Samarin quote, emphasis mine again: I don't know the setting of that quote, but it does appear that he sets aside the politeness with which he delicately separates glossolalia from gibberish.

I do not believe you are accurately reflecting what they're saying. But more detail later. And where do the phonetic similarities come from? The native language of the SITter. He's talking about the quality of the stuff we're making up, not declaring it to be a hidden, unknown or secret language

I'd say your argument is languishing. ;) Seriously, I'm on my phone again. Will answer at greater length later