Abstract: Because many questions have arisen regarding the discovery of real early modern influence in the dictated language of the Book of Mormon, some of these are considered and answered in this essay. The answers reflect insights from an exploration of the data that drove the conclusions published in previous papers. Numerous considerations independently indicate that the Book of Mormon was dictated in language that cannot be explained as a mere imitation of King James linguistic style, nor as Joseph Smith’s Yankee dialect. While the reasons for this and the processes that may have led to such results are open for debate, the implications of the data themselves cannot be lightly brushed aside.

An examination of the language of the original Book of Mormon text by Royal Skousen (since 1988), and also by the writer of this essay (since 2014), has generated a large amount of unexpected linguistic data that undermine common assumptions about Book of Mormon English and translation, including the assumption that Joseph must have used his own archaic and uneducated grammar in constructing its language.

The discovery of a strong current of nonbiblical earlier English in the Book of Mormon was driven by the data, since the initial hypothesis for both Skousen and this author was that its English usage might approximate that of the King James Bible, and that it might be similar to what is found in roughly contemporaneous pseudo-archaic texts. But the data showed otherwise.

[Page 108]While discoveries in this area have made some uncomfortable, the data deserve to be considered (text-critical volumes contain analyses of a large amount of relevant data, and later papers may present additional unpublished treatments of the English-language data). Various questions and some objections have been raised in response, some of which seem to ignore much of the data. While we can’t establish exactly why so much nonbiblical Early Modern English is in the text that Joseph Smith dictated, we can answer a number of questions with clarity.

Questions and Answers

The answers presented here to a number of questions on Book of Mormon English (and translation) are based on extensive research and comparative study.¹ Unfortunately, that has not been true of most comments made about Book of Mormon English through time. Thus, there has been an accumulation of layers of underinformed opinions. Some of these are incorporated in the questions found in this essay.

In the balance of this essay, I present each question as a heading for ease of reference and follow all the questions with a short summary.

Did Joseph Smith speak an ultra-archaic dialect in 1829, at the time he dictated the Book of Mormon?

No, his early writings (mainly as personal letters: 1829–1833)² indicate that he didn’t. They reflect his speech to some appreciable degree, since he wasn’t trained to write very differently from how he spoke.³ His early writings suggest that he spoke a fairly standard nineteenth-century American dialect, along with a lesser component of grammar that had come to be regarded over the years as inferior to competing forms of expression. (Of course, Joseph had learned this bad grammar⁴ growing up, so it was part of his native-speaker grammatical system.) There are quite a few linguistic tendencies apparent in his early writings that are the opposite of mostly pervasive Book of Mormon English usage, and these tendencies also agree with what is known generally about American English usage of the time. Eight of these are: (1) a strong preference for infinitival over finite verb complementation (11 to 1),⁵ (2) almost all simple past usage without did (164 to 1),⁶ (3) a strong preference for the relative pronoun who over that (49 to 13), followed distantly by which (2×),⁷ (4) a preference for ellipsis of various linguistic elements over repetition, (5) a preference for the future auxiliary will over shall (71 to 35),⁸ (6) a preference for the conjunction [Page 109]except over save (4 to 0), (7) the use of the past participle arrived, not arriven (6 to 0),⁹ and (8) a preference for the verb want over desire (7 to 2).¹⁰

Even if Joseph had spoken something close to 1590s Elizabethan English,¹¹ there are still salient aspects of Book of Mormon English that he would have been unlikely to produce, such as the pervasive pattern of heavy finite verb complementation after verbs like cause, command, and suffer. That wasn’t the pattern of 1590s English, which at that time was less than twenty-five percent finite after command and less than five percent finite after cause and suffer.¹² There’s also no evidence that he would have employed “it supposeth me” (dative me), even though it’s an archaic construction.¹³ Such examples could be multiplied many times.

A more general point is that Joseph Smith didn’t belong to a small dialect group. His recent ancestors had not lived in an isolated geographical area for centuries, such as a few mountain valley communities. His dialect group was a large one, composed of hundreds of thousands of speakers from various regions of New England and New York. Furthermore, the broad English textual record—both British and American—indicates that English usage had undergone some universal shifts over the centuries, away from what we see so often in the Book of Mormon, such as a shift to even less finite verb complementation than before, a strong shift toward the personal relative pronoun who (and a marginalization of the personal relative pronoun which), and a nearly complete elimination of (1) subordinate that, (2) future/present subjunctive shall, and (3) positive, non-emphatic periphrastic did. As such, in order for the ultra-archaic dialect theory to be correct, a large New England–New York dialect group, which Joseph Smith was a part of, must have somehow conserved many archaic features from the 1500s that had disappeared from the textual record, including from the early American Evans corpus.

Did Joseph Smith understand the meaning of the Nephite record and then use his own language to express that meaning?

No, he didn’t—unless one subscribes to the ultra-archaic dialect theory, which is that Joseph spoke 1590s Elizabethan English in 1820s America. The original Book of Mormon text is extensively archaic in its sentence structure and very often not biblical; its level of archaism is much greater than any known pseudo-archaic text.¹⁴ The nonbiblical archaism is both lexical and syntactic. Some archaic syntactic features [Page 110]are ubiquitous in the text. No known pseudo-archaic author—not even a Shakespearean scholar or a medievalist¹⁵—had anywhere near the level of knowledge of Early Modern English that is exhibited in the Book of Mormon. Also, Joseph’s own linguistic preferences directly opposed Book of Mormon usage in thousands of instances (see the previous answer).

Is Book of Mormon English usage only statistically different from pseudo-archaic usage?

No, unless we take this to frequently include zero percent. In other words, the Book of Mormon has many instances of archaic vocabulary and syntactic usage which currently known pseudo-archaic texts (more than two dozen) have no examples of. Here are five simple syntactic examples out of dozens that could be mentioned. Pseudo-archaic texts don’t have pro-clausal “save it «be»” usage (125×) or the impersonal, simple dative construction “it supposeth me that . . .” (4×) or referential “of which/whom «have» been spoken” (9×) or the leveled past participle “had (been) spake” (13×) or object “they which” usage (23×).

Do the many instances of bad grammar found in the original Book of Mormon text mean that Joseph Smith worded the text?

No, there are more than one hundred instances of nonstandard grammar in the text that he was unlikely to produce, since they weren’t part of his native-speaker grammatical system. Even some types of bad grammar that he was known to use have subtypes or individual instances that he was unlikely to produce, such as “there was but few which denied the covenant of freedom” (Alma 46:35)¹⁶ (unlikely because of personal “few which”; a single match of the string “there was but few which” is currently known, from the middle of the sixteenth-century).¹⁷

Could Joseph Smith’s use of the term translate apply to him dictating words that the Lord revealed to him?

Yes, it could mean that he received words from the Lord, which agrees with a straightforward reading of 2 Nephi 27:24. To be clear, neither the revealed-ideas position nor the revealed-words position interprets the verb translate according to today’s default sense, which is “to express or convey the meaning of (a word or text) using equivalent words in a different language.”¹⁸ And it is worth mentioning that Joseph Smith [Page 111]could not have been a translator in the usual sense in 1829 since he was a monolingual English speaker at that time.

If Joseph received words from the Lord, does this mean that there was only one translator of the Nephite record into English?

No, the Lord might have commissioned multiple translators to carry out the task or he might have translated it in some other way we’re unfamiliar with. No one knows for sure how it was translated from the original source material into mostly English words.

If the Book of Mormon has expressions, metaphors, and images that Joseph Smith might have made, does this mean that the translation involved his mind and language?

No, the Lord could have made or directed such an English-language translation. This type of language includes phrases that appear to have been common in Joseph’s time. One reason for this perception is that the Google Books database (the source for the Ngram Viewer) currently has 20.5 billion words published between 1801 and 1829, while it has “only” 4.9 billion words published between 1470 and 1800 (less than half of what the two largest databases covering that span of time have). Thus, the early nineteenth century is represented in Google Books at nearly 50× the rate of the preceding 330 years!¹⁹

These phrases have often been called nineteenth-century phrases, even though some of them might have been more popular a century before or even centuries earlier. Joseph presumably could have worded these phrases, but the Lord could have done so as well. What Joseph was unable to produce were dozens of items of nonbiblical, obsolete vocabulary, a substantial amount of the archaic syntax, and even the biblical passages (see immediately below).

Did Joseph Smith somehow reference a printed biblical text when dictating the biblical material for the Book of Mormon, since various italicized words were changed?

No, there are 712 word or constituent differences between biblical readings and Book of Mormon readings, some of which are complex.²⁰ There would probably be fewer than one hundred differences²¹ had Joseph referred to a King James Bible, whether real or eidetic (that is, crystal-clear visual imagery of biblical pages).²²

Also, italicized changes were above the average change rate but were still less than one-fourth of the changes (22.9 percent). Moreover, [Page 112]thirty-one times there is a non-italics difference right next to an italicized word or phrase that was maintained. (And Joseph Smith might not have even known, in 1829, why some words were italicized in the Bible.)

All biblical language in the Book of Mormon, at the level of the clause or sentence, must be taken into account in order to reach reliable conclusions. Such thorough analysis reveals that there are 31 stretches of verbatim quoting of the King James text in the Book of Mormon above 100 words (ranging between 104 and 261 words). Yet at the same time there are many seemingly trivial, meaning-neutral differences, some of which go against Joseph Smith’s own English-language preferences, such as changing a biblical will to shall, and changing multiple instances of a biblical personal that to which, and inserting personal which where there wasn’t any relative pronoun in the King James text. There was no reason for Joseph to make such changes, and it is unlikely that he would have done so; yet there they are. This argues against him doing these.

In addition to these things, the biblical chapter system was ignored, biblical punctuation was ignored, and there are also a few tweaks to the biblical text, as dictated by Joseph, which are early modern in character, and which he was unlikely to have made himself. Furthermore, the insertion of the Septuagint / Coverdale phrase “upon all (the) ships of the sea” (2 Nephi 12:16) cannot be explained by Joseph somehow referencing a printed King James text. Finally, the Book of Mormon has quoted biblical language from eleven different books of the King James Bible. So he would have needed to refer to one-sixth of the books in the Bible.

Do the following excerpts (from the preface to the First Book of Nephi) contain a mixture of early and late modern English verb forms: “The Lord warns Lehi to depart out of the land of Jerusalem because he prophesieth unto the people concerning their iniquity”; “Nephi taketh his brethren and returns to the land of Jerusalem”?

No. First, verbs ending in {-s} inflection (third-person-singular, present-tense verbs) were also used in the early modern period, and this kind of inflectional variation was common back then. Second, the vast majority of Book of Mormon English usage is early modern in character. Thus, it follows that an early modern view for verbs ending in {-s} in the Book of Mormon should be privileged.

[Page 113]As for these two examples, the same inflectional variation of the first excerpt occurs within a span of eighty-five words in a seventeenth-century text (1685); and the same inflectional variation of the second excerpt occurs within a span of fifteen words in a sixteenth-century text (1579). This type of variation is also found in many of Shakespeare’s plays.

Does extra negation such as “there were no robbers nor no murderers, neither were there Lamanites nor no manner of ites” (4 Nephi 1:17) provide evidence that Joseph Smith worded the text?

No. First, the text has various types of extra negation, and each type has its own historical patterns of use. In this case, “nor no . . .” (which occurs six times in the Book of Mormon) was still used in the early nineteenth century by educated British and American speakers. Second, in Joseph Smith’s early writings, when he had the opportunity to use “nor no,” he didn’t.²³ Third, “nor no manner of X” (4×) was phraseology that was already rare by the eighteenth century;²⁴ it primarily appears in texts of the sixteenth century and earlier. Fourth, “nor no” occurs forty times in Shakespeare’s plays. Thus, the six instances in the Book of Mormon are more properly interpreted as early modern usage, and more likely to be the result of an English-language translation that the Lord directed.

Does the following bad grammar provide evidence for Joseph wording the Book of Mormon: “seeing that the holy scriptures testifies of these things” (Alma 34:30)?

This is further evidence of the English-language translation being the result of early modern grammatical knowledge. In this case, 23 instances of “scriptures testifies” occur in an early modern corpus of 1.4 billion words (1473–1700), but no instances occur in a late modern corpus of 4.4 billion words (1771–1800+).²⁵

Is the Book of Mormon entirely early modern in its language?

No, but the vast majority of it is. The clearest examples of late modern usage are vocabulary items such as derangement (‘disturbance, disorder’) and transpire (‘to take place’), which entered English in the 1730s and the 1760s, respectively. However, the fact that a small amount of its lexical usage began to be used in English in the 1700s doesn’t mean that Joseph Smith chose these words. While he could [Page 114]have chosen almost any of the words whose meanings were current in his time, he certainly did not choose any words whose contextual meaning was obsolete in his time, such as but if meaning ‘unless’ and whereby meaning ‘why?’ and depart meaning ‘divide.’ (Those who don’t believe that any nonbiblical Book of Mormon meanings were obsolete in Joseph’s time oppose the crowd-sourced position of the Oxford English Dictionary, in dozens of instances.) He also didn’t choose almost 200 unique Book of Mormon names. These lexical facts—firmly supported by its pervasive archaic syntax—argue against him choosing even modern words like derangement and transpire.

Is “had partook” in 1 Nephi 8:25 bad grammar?

No, the phrase was used by literate authors in both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While “had partook” began to appear in texts in the second half of the 1600s, the much more frequent (and morphologically related) “had took” began to appear in the second half of the 1500s. The larger context in the Book of Mormon is the following:

1 Nephi 8:25
And after that they had partook of the fruit of the tree,
they did cast their eyes about as if they were ashamed.

This combination of archaic “after that” and non-emphatic periphrastic did usage was most characteristic of the second half of the sixteenth century.

The above sentence has a subordinate clause followed by a main clause. Focusing on these, we find that the above combination of a past perfect “after that” clause and a main clause with a non-emphatic periphrastic did doesn’t occur in either the King James Bible or pseudo-archaic texts, but that it does occur twelve times in the Book of Mormon, and in the textual record as well, mostly between the years 1550 and 1670.²⁶

Is the language of 1 Nephi 8:25 a Frankenstein hybrid of early modern syntax?

No, similar to how taketh and returns, used close together, isn’t a patchwork of early and late modern morphosyntax, this passage doesn’t have a Frankenstein hybrid of early modern usage. In general, nonspecialists cannot accurately discern whether different parts of [Page 115]Book of Mormon sentences represent usage from different centuries. And in many cases, the popularity of specific language use, textually speaking, exhibits a complex pattern.

There are three ways to look at the syntax of the above sentence: as late sixteenth-century usage, as late seventeenth-century usage, or as a non-clashing combination of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century usage. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter which view we take; none of them mean(s) that Joseph Smith worded it.

Summary

This completes an abbreviated attempt to answer some common questions about Book of Mormon English. As one reads the original language, questions always arise about grammatical usage, but in the vast majority of instances, the nonstandard language in question occurred at some point in the early modern period, while the same cannot be said of the late modern period.²⁷ My hope is that the foregoing will clear up some prevalent misunderstandings about this topic and lead to a greater appreciation of the language that Joseph Smith dictated in 1829.