already<\/em> available. \u00a0In posting it here, I\u2019ve unfortunately (and, so far as I can tell, pretty much unavoidably) ruined much of his formatting. \u00a0But the content remains unimpaired. \u00a0And I expect that a properly-formatted version of this statement will appear reasonably soon on the website of the Interpreter Foundation.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Summary of Spelling in the Manuscripts and Editions<\/em>, part 6 of volume 3, The History of the\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Text of the Book of Mormon<\/em>, by Royal Skousen<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nFor part 6 of volume 3 of the Book of Mormon critical text project, we take up what may<\/span><\/p>\nseem like a mundane subject, namely, misspellings in the manuscripts and in the printed editions.<\/span><\/p>\nThis brief summary of the book will introduce the reader to three important questions regarding<\/span><\/p>\nscribal misspellings in the manuscripts:<\/span><\/p>\nFirst, did the 1830 typesetter adopt Oliver Cowdery\u2019s misspellings in the manuscript<\/span><\/p>\nwhen he set the text for the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon?<\/span><\/p>\nSecond, just how good were the Book of Mormon scribes in doing their copywork?<\/span><\/p>\nAnd third, can the misspellings tell us anything important about the Book of Mormon<\/span><\/p>\ntext, or are they just innocuous errors?<\/span><\/p>\nThe answers to all three of these questions turn out to be crucial in doing critical text work on<\/span><\/p>\nthe Book of Mormon.<\/span><\/p>\nThe first chapter in part 6 is entitled \u201cMisunderstanding Spelling Variation in the Book of<\/span><\/p>\nMormon\u201d, and it deals with an article that has had an inordinate influence for the past 36 years<\/span><\/p>\non how Latter-day Saints have understood misspellings in the Book of Mormon manuscripts and<\/span><\/p>\nin the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon, namely, George Horton\u2019s \u201cUnderstanding Textual<\/span><\/p>\nChanges in the Book of Mormon\u201d, published in the LDS Church\u2019s Ensign in December, 1983.<\/span><\/p>\nDespite Horton\u2019s implicit claim in the title of his article that he will undertake to explain<\/span><\/p>\n\u201ctextual changes\u201d, he virtually ignores the subject of substantive changes in the text of the Book<\/span><\/p>\nof Mormon and instead devotes most of the article to the less important question of spelling<\/span><\/p>\nvariation in the early text of the Book of Mormon. In this regard, I evaluate several provocative<\/span><\/p>\nstatements of Horton\u2019s in the first chapter of part 6 and find them false in virtually every aspect:<\/span><\/p>\n(1) \u201cThe spelling in the first edition was Oliver Cowdery\u2019s.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n(2) \u201cConsider, too, that the two distinct words strait and straight would sound exactly<\/span><\/p>\nthe same as Joseph dictated it. But Oliver spelled both words straight every time.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n(3) \u201cAmerican English spelling in 1829 was not yet standardized.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n(4) \u201cAs late as 1828, American lexicographer Noah Webster noted that five dictionaries<\/span><\/p>\nwere available to him. Examples from four of those dictionaries show the variations in<\/span><\/p>\nspellings commonly accepted at the time Oliver was taking dictation from the Prophet.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n(5) \u201cIt is not surprising, then, that many words in the Book of Mormon would need to be<\/span><\/p>\ncorrected as American English spelling became more uniform later in the nineteenth<\/span><\/p>\ncentury.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nNot only can we prove these statements false, but we can also find the sources that Horton<\/span><\/p>\napparently misread or misunderstood and thus led him to make these unsupportable conclusions<\/span><\/p>\nabout the manuscripts and the early editions of the Book of Mormon.<\/span><\/p>\nIn the second chapter of part 6, entitled \u201cThe Manuscripts and Their Scribes\u201d, I turn to the<\/span><\/p>\nquestion of good and bad scribes in the manuscripts. For the extant 28 percent of the original<\/span><\/p>\nmanuscript (O) of the Book of Mormon text, we have the handwriting of four scribes: Oliver<\/span><\/p>\nCowdery, John Whitmer, Christian Whitmer, and Joseph Smith himself. Oliver was the main<\/span><\/p>\nscribe, and his hand is found on virtually every extant leaf and fragment except for 23 pages<\/span><\/p>\nin 1 Nephi. For that part of the text, the two Whitmers each took down Joseph\u2019s dictation for<\/span><\/p>\nabout a dozen pages each. And finally, Joseph Smith himself wrote down the text for 28 words<\/span><\/p>\nin Alma 45:22.<\/span><\/p>\nThe printer\u2019s manuscript (P), the copy of O, is fully extant except for one and a half lines<\/span><\/p>\nat the bottom of page 1 and also the same amount at the bottom of page 2 (the verso of page 1).<\/span><\/p>\nHere in P we have the handwriting for three scribes: again, Oliver Cowdery is the main scribe,<\/span><\/p>\nand he accounts for 83.0 percent of the text; then Martin Harris for 16.4 percent (who twice<\/span><\/p>\ntakes over for Oliver, in Mosiah 25 \u2013 Alma 13 and in 3 Nephi 19 \u2013 Mormon 9); and finally<\/span><\/p>\nHyrum Smith for only 0.6 percent (who takes over for Martin for five short intervals in<\/span><\/p>\nMosiah 28 \u2013 Alma 5). The identification of scribes 2 and 3 of O as John and Christian Whitmer,<\/span><\/p>\nand scribe 2 of P as Martin Harris are recent and tentative, to varying degrees of probability:<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cvery likely\u201d, for John Whitmer; \u201cpossibly\u201d, for Christian Whitmer; and \u201cprobably\u201d, for Martin<\/span><\/p>\nHarris. In part 7 of volume 3, I will provide the evidence that supports these identifications.<\/span><\/p>\nIn evaluating the abilities of these scribes, we consider four different types of errors:<\/span><\/p>\nTYPE OF ERROR TYPICAL EXAMPLES<\/span><\/p>\nmisspelling cept [kept], excede, apparrel, weopon, citties, truely<\/span><\/p>\nspelling slips concening, ome [one], woice, Nindred, Nepi<\/span><\/p>\nword slips \u201cin my shall they called\u201d (missing name and be) [Mosiah 26:18]<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cthe number Number of the slain\u201d (a dittography) [Alma 3:l]<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cpartakers of the spirit of the tree of life\u201d (error for fruit) [Alma 5:62]<\/span><\/p>\ntextual changes \u201cI cried > did cry unto the Lord [1 Nephi 2:16]<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cto be cast with sorrow > NULL <\/span>into a watery grave\u201d [1 Nephi 18:18]<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cbeing nursed > nourished by the Gentiles\u201d [1 Nephi 22:8]<\/span><\/p>\nIn the second chapter of part 6, in comparing the abilities of the different scribes, we count only<\/span><\/p>\nthe first three of these error types. Although the fourth type definitely includes scribal errors,<\/span><\/p>\nwe can be sure of an error only because the copytext, the original manuscript, still exists. In this<\/span><\/p>\nsecond chapter, we wish to determine the scribes\u2019 ability to correctly copy the text, but for much<\/span><\/p>\nof the scribes\u2019 work we do not have a copytext that will allow us to accurately do this. This<\/span><\/p>\nautomatically holds for any scribe of O that wrote down Joseph Smith\u2019s words as he dictated<\/span><\/p>\nthem to the scribe. To be sure, an obvious error in O can be detected, such as \u201cishmael and also<\/span><\/p>\nhis hole hole\u201d (in 1 Nephi 7:5) and \u201ctherefore my Sons see that ye are merciful unto your<\/span><\/p>\nBrethren\u201d (in Alma 41:14), where Alma is speaking only to one son, Corianton. But there is no<\/span><\/p>\nrecord of what words Joseph saw in his instrument or what he actually said when he dictated<\/span><\/p>\nthose words. We have only what the scribe copied down. Similarly, if a scribe copied a portion\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nof O into P but that portion of O is no longer extant, we can still determine the scribe\u2019s<\/span><\/p>\nmisspellings, spelling slips, and word slips, but not the substantive textual changes unless they<\/span><\/p>\nare obvious errors. For this reason, we will exclude the fourth error type in measuring a scribe\u2019s<\/span><\/p>\nability since we want to compare the scribes against each other \u2013 and also against themselves (in<\/span><\/p>\norder to determine if their scribal ability may have changed over time). Ultimately, we will not<\/span><\/p>\nignore these substantive textual changes: they will be considered in depth in part 7 of volume 3<\/span><\/p>\nwhen we determine the transmission of the text from the manuscripts through the editions.<\/span><\/p>\nThere is one other kind of spelling that we ignore in determining scribal errors, namely,<\/span><\/p>\nacceptable variant spellings that occurred in printed matter in the early 1800s, spelling variants<\/span><\/p>\nsuch as centre, enquire, journied, sayeth, saviour, and sea shore. It turns out that Oliver Cowdery<\/span><\/p>\nused these spelling variants quite often, and some of these variants are still acceptable in America<\/span><\/p>\nor in Britain.<\/span><\/p>\nWe therefore apply the first three errors types to the known Book of Mormon scribes,<\/span><\/p>\nand we end up with two measures: (1) misspellings, and (2) obvious scribal slips. The latter<\/span><\/p>\nmeasures the overall sloppiness of the scribe and combines spelling slips and obvious word slips.<\/span><\/p>\nWe exclude Joseph Smith from the list because his 28 words in O form too small a sampling to<\/span><\/p>\nmake any effective analysis of his scribal work in the Book of Mormon manuscripts (there are<\/span><\/p>\nno slips and only one misspelling, citty). We list eight samplings of Oliver Cowdery\u2019s scribal<\/span><\/p>\nwork (one sampling from O and seven from P). For the other scribes we consider all their<\/span><\/p>\nscribal work. Martin Harris\u2019s scribal work is divided into four parts. And for the sake of<\/span><\/p>\ncomparison, we include the 1830 typesetter John Gilbert\u2019s error rates. We end up with the<\/span><\/p>\nfollowing conclusions:<\/span><\/p>\n(1) Martin Harris was a relatively good speller, but his rate of scribal slips was fairly high.<\/span><\/p>\n(2) Oliver Cowdery\u2019s spelling improved over time. This is probably because he was the one<\/span><\/p>\nproofing the 1830 typeset sheets against the manuscript.<\/span><\/p>\n(3) Oliver Cowdery\u2019s scribal slips were consistently low, and much better than any of the<\/span><\/p>\nother scribes. This is one reason why Oliver was the preferred scribe.<\/span><\/p>\n(4) There are two really bad scribes, Christian Whitmer and Hyrum Smith. Both their rates of<\/span><\/p>\nmisspelling and scribal error are very high.<\/span><\/p>\nThe final chapter of part 6 is an extensive 455-page analysis of all the misspellings in the<\/span><\/p>\nmanuscripts as well as the spelling variants in the printed editions of the Book of Mormon. Most<\/span><\/p>\nof the sections in this chapter are organized according to phonemes (that is, sounds). At the end,<\/span><\/p>\nthere are a few sections dealing with the spelling of certain graphemes (that is, letters), such as<\/span><\/p>\nsilent e and the letter x. And to conclude this entire analysis, there is an eight-page index of all<\/span><\/p>\nthe words in the analysis, organized according to their standard spellings.<\/span><\/p>\nGiven all this analysis of the misspellings, one may reasonably ask: \u201cCan there any good<\/span><\/p>\nthing come out of misspellings?\u201d One purpose of part 6, dedicated entirely to the spellings in the<\/span><\/p>\nmanuscripts and the editions, is to show the numerous ways in which spelling issues have had an<\/span><\/p>\nimportant impact in the critical text project of the Book of Mormon. Here are some of the things<\/span><\/p>\nthat spellings errors can tell us:<\/span><\/p>\n(1) Joseph Smith\u2019s pronunciation of names such as Amalickiah, Melchizedek, and Mosiah<\/span><\/p>\n(2) various dialectal pronunciations for the scribes: wage as written wedge (Oliver Cowdery),<\/span><\/p>\nscroll as scrawl (Martin Harris), Nazareth as nathareth (Christian Whitmer), and spacious<\/span><\/p>\nas specious (for both Christian and John Whitmer)<\/span><\/p>\n(3) a word\u2019s pronunciation sometimes led to a scribal error: scourge was pronounced as if it<\/span><\/p>\n
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