Talk:Nephi

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is part of Latter Day Saint movement WikiProject, an attempt to provide comprehensive and detailed information about the Latter Day Saint movement and Mormonism on Wikipedia. To participate in the project, edit this article, visit the List of articles about the Latter Day Saint movement, the project page, and/or join the discussion. For writing guidelines about contributing to the project, you may want to read Wikipedia:Manual of Style (Latter Day Saints) and Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Latter Day Saints)
??? This article has not yet received a rating on the Project's quality scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page.
Biography Portal
??? This article has not yet received a rating on the project's quality scale. [FAQ]

Please rate the article and, if you wish, leave comments here regarding your assessment or the strengths and weaknesses of the article.
Photo request It is requested that a picture or pictures of this person be included in this article to improve its quality.


Contents

[edit] Hebrew and Arabic forms

I've deleted the parenthetical Hebrew and Arabic forms of the name. See Talk:Linguistics and the Book of Mormon for my reasons. Pterodactyler 14:59, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Redundancy

I reverted the section in the introduction at the end of the paragraph and shown in bold below:

The name Nephi is used in the context of the Book of Mormon to refer to the following persons, places and books. There is no archeological evidence of the ancient usage of these names in the Americas or that any of the places, persons or events actually existed or happened.

Fred Bauder re-entered the text. I believe that this is redundant with the information already present in the sentence to which it was added. What do others think? Val42 15:44, September 3, 2005 (UTC)

I don't think it's redundant. Val's version deals only with the name Nephi, so an uninformed reader might conclude that Nephi is a modern name for an established historical figure who did not himself use that name. Fred's version, on the other hand is too broad. Which "places, persons or events" is he referring to? (There are no events called Nephi.) I would propose something along these lines: "Outside of the Book of Mormon account, there is no evidence that any of these Nephis existed." (except the city of Nephi, Utah, of course; maybe we can move that one to a disambiguation page?) Pterodactyler 17:00, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
That would be acceptable to me, once you work out the exact wording to "except" the city. But to be truthful, we will have to apply the same (or similar) wording to most all of the persons in the Bible and Quoran. Since Fred Bauder made this wording change here and in the Book of Mormon article, perhaps he would volunteer to apply this same standard to these other books. Val42 17:29, September 3, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Disambiguation page

This is addressing the comment by Pterodactyler about possibly making a disambiguation page. The article page is sort of a disambiguation page but with a brief explaination of each usage of "Nephi". I think that the accounts of person's named Nephi are better dealt with in the articles about the books named after them. The city of Nephi should definitely be on its own page. I like the format of this page the way that it is. Val42 17:29, September 3, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Speculation regarding a compass

I removed the section speculating on the existence of compass technology as it was unrelated to the subject of the article. I did, however, modify the "liahona" reference to remove the direct statement that the liahona was a compass. andersonpd 05:00, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

According to Alma 37:38, "our fathers called it Liahona, which is, being interpreted, a compass". It may or may not have had an actual compass, but it certainly did more. I think that they picked the word that most closely match the object that they had. I like the change that you made to the Nephi article though because it catches the sense of the use of the object rather than the sense of "compass", the word that they used for the object. Val42 16:50, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
Thank you, that is the sense I was trying to convey. The deleted section seemed to me to equate "compass" with "magnetic compass" rather than the sense of any device that gives direction, which is what I think the scripture intends. Maybe today it would be "which is, being interpreted, a GPS receiver"!! andersonpd 21:00, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Words/Specualtion of words

Here's two thoughts

Sometimes in translation, there is no word for what the speaker is saying orwriting. In which case either a close sounding replica is used, or a word that is closest to the meaning, is used. So, I don't think it is nescessarily important what the word "liahona" ment, only the point or message that is being conveyed.

In this case the point was that the liahona gave dirrection when all were following the laws of God, and stopped working when they went against the laws of God. There for the cloeset word availible to the english language at the time of translation would be "compass" or the closest sounding would be the anglosized "liahona".

Another examlpe not from the book of mormon would be the word Tsnami, in the english language we usually pronouce it "soo-nam-ee", where as when pronounced in the native language it may sound closer to "t'soo-nam-ee".

[edit] Tone of article

The article appears to be written as if Nephi is an actual historical figure. To be NPOV, the sections that say "Nephi was..." should be changed to "According to the Book of Mormon, Nephi was..." or something similar. Badagnani 03:15, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia has a great deal of content devoted to myhthical, scriptural or fictional characters, however I believe it is normally customary to state kind of person in the opening paragraph of the article. I'd add something like: "The historicity of Nephi story is not generally accepted by non-LDS historians or archaeologists."
We find very similar text on the page about Nephites, the group of people that this Nephi allegedly founded, however nowhere on the nephi article do we mention that he is almost certainly a fictional or mythical character. --Salimfadhley (talk) 16:56, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] My edits

I made quite a few edits, and would appreciate someone looking over them. I think in general, this article needs some serious work, before I started editing, it was a general narrative that was out of order, and referred only to the narrative of the Book of Mormon itself. --Descartes1979 (talk) 23:04, 10 February 2008 (UTC)