John Larsen and Dr. Allen Manning, Linguistics
Project
The similarities between the Bible and the Book of Mormon have often been pointed out by Scholars and critics alike. My research was to compare language similarities in the two texts linguistically. For twelve chapters in the Book of Mormon the text runs almost exactly parallel to that in the book of Isaiah. I intended to isolate directly the differences in the two texts and attempt to classify them linguistically. Through this classification I hoped to discover possible explanation and any symmetry or system to the changes. The changes would also be analyzed in terms of period language usage to see if change was motivated by dialectical change in English usage.
Results
The first challenge was to isolate changes in a manageable way. After locating the changes I isolated them into certain types and possible motivation. Unfortunately, the total count of the number of changes would depend on who is doing the counting; it would be hard to develop a completely objective set. I isolated about 150 changes that I considered to be independent. I broke these changes into four categories: insertion, deletion, lexical change and grammatical change (including tense).
About half of the changes in the text were insertions of passages, words or substitutions of one word for another. Very little editing of the Isaiah text in the form of deletion was present and it was usually in conjunction with minor grammatical or lexical changes. The other changes were mostly grammatical in the form of tense, person and case. Complementizers such as “that”, “who” or “which” were also common targets.
The two texts were surprisingly semantically consistent despite the changes. Never did they very more than slightly in wording and story. Possible the most significant change was the insertion or deletion of a “not.” Most changes did not alter the text in significant ways. Grammatical changes were often consistent with modem English, however the changes were not general or inclusive through the entire text. For example “also is” was changed to the more modem “is also” in one verse, but in the preceding verse the change was not made and it was left as “also is” in both texts. Other changes such as “hath” to the more modem “has” occurred only twice in the text, but was left unchanged scores of times. Overall the changes in the Joseph Smith version were more linguistically consistent with nineteenth-century English. This cannot be counted as the primary reason for the alterations because most verses were left unchanged and for every example of grammatical modernization 20 examples of no change at all could be found. I consider the changes to be largely unsystematic and without consistent causes. In fact, three verse were rendered ungrammatical by the changes made in the Nephi version.
Difficulties
A consistent pattern of language change was hard to arrive at. Change one would expect to see often were fairly rare or inconsistent in appearance. It was also hard to 123 determine where a change began and ended. Because these texts purport to be translations of ancient language, it would be interesting to compare the changes made with grammatical structures in eighth century B.C.E. Hebrew to see if the changes were consistent with grammatical patterns in the original era writings.
In fact, one might be inclined to verify the claim of Joseph Smith that the source text for the Book of Mormon was in fact not the King James Bible. If so, he would be more likely to either make no changes in the text or make them in a consistent manner. In my opinion, one text was not clearer or more consistent than the other. Changes in the text did not render one more readable or more valuable than the other. This would be consistent, in my opinion with two texts that originated form a single source document and were change slightly rather than one being formatted from the other.
For Further Research
This research seemed to leave more questions unanswered than answered. A further possible avenue of research would be to compare the first edition of the Book of Mormon with latter editions (small grammatical, spelling and punctuation changes were made). Some English modernizations might have crept into the text due to corrections in the manuscript.
This research is just the start of a bigger picture in usage and borrowing in the Book of Mormon. How much of the text is duplicated in the entire book? Are there other passages that seem to be borrowed in significant ways.