In The Nature of the Original Language [of the Book of Mormon] (hereafter, NOL), Royal Skousen and Stanford Carmack indicated that additional research into the language of the Book of Mormon might discover that some of the archaic words, phrases, and expressions identified at the beginning of NOL had also occurred later in the period of Early Modern English. Regrettably, they were hampered at the time by limitations in the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) database.
But much of that difficulty has since been overcome. Accordingly, Carmack has spent the past year or so reviewing the potentially archaic words, phrases, and expressions discussed in NOL, and, having thoroughly weighed that initial re-analysis, Skousen has now written a fresh report on the subject.
We have already posted pre-prints of their revised discussion of apparently archaic vocabulary at https://dev.interpreterfoundation.org/blog-pre-print-of-revisions-in-the-analysis-of-archaic-language-in-the-book-of-mormon/ and of seemingly archaic phrases at https://dev.interpreterfoundation.org/blog-pre-print-of-revisions-in-the-analysis-of-archaic-phrases-in-the-book-of-mormon/.
In what follows — which is likewise a pre-print of material that will appear in part 8 of volume 3 of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project — Skousen and Carmack report the results of their renewed inquiry into what they had previous identified as archaic grammar. Most of the seemingly archaic grammatical phenomena treated in NOL persisted longer than they had originally proposed, into the eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries. But they have also added two examples that are probably if not certainly archaic.
These revisions illustrate the care and integrity with which the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project has been conducted from its inception. The Interpreter Foundation is honored to be associated with this effort.
— Dan Peterson
Links to the databases mentioned in this write-up:
| OED | Oxford English Dictionary: online, third edition [in progress] https://www.oed.com/ |
| EEBO | Early English Books Online (texts from the late 1400s up through 1700) https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebogroup/ Search Engine: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?page=simple;g=eebogroup |
| ECCO | Eighteenth Century Collections Online (texts from 1700 through 1800) https://www.gale.com/primary-sources/eighteenth-century-collections-online |
| DOST | A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (texts from before 1700) https://dsl.ac.uk/ |
| Google Books | Advanced Book Search https://books.google.com/advanced_book_search |
NOTE: This is a pre-print of what will appear in part 8 of Volume III: The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon. As such, we have not made it available for downloading or printing. Please refrain from bypassing these restrictions.
Thanks for publishing these. My Book of Mormon has increasing numbers of notes with nuanced and archaic meanings.
Page 9 under “the one” references 1 Nephi 16:9. It should be 1 Nephi 16:10. There are 2 references that need amending.