If people are going
to criticize the language, orthography, syntax, spelling, and grammar of the Book of Mormon, which resulted in numerous changes after publication, then
it should be something one does with knowledge, not simply because it appears
outdated, uneducated, or archaic by today’s standards.
As an example, the
language that existed in New England in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries has a long and complex history, dating as far back as the Christian
era in England, around 600 A.D., where the Roman letters and alphabet replaced
the Germanic “runes,” which was previously used mostly for incantations,
curses, and some poems, when tribes were small and still on the continent and
through their migration to Britain and the period of Christianization.
The Roman alphabet,
however, was never perfectly adapted for writing English even when first used to
represent Anglo-Saxon. The first monks writing English using Roman letters soon
added new characters to handle the extra sounds, such as the Anglo-Saxon “æ,”
called ash, or the runic characters fricatives “þ,” called thorn and “ð,” called eth,
and “ȝ,” called yogh, which in medieval times where replaced with the digraphs, or
single sounds (phoneme) represented by two letters: “th,” “sh,” and “gh.”
Like any new
language, no norms for writing words consistently was adopted, and had not been
absolute in Anglo-Saxon before that. Obviously, it is not easy for writers to
remember a single orthographic representation, called a spelling, for a word
yet such is required for standardization. Unfortunately, then as now (in new
words), writers prefer to produce written forms they have seen before for
specific words, even if there is not a good match between written characters
and sounds.
In addition, getting a
pronunciation out of alphabetic writing requires people to analyze the sound
string down to the level of component sounds. Yet this type of phonemic
analysis is apparently not an obvious or natural one for people; it needs to be
taught intensively before it can be spoken somewhat automatically and that is one
reason why acquisition of literacy at an early age is stressed in cultures with
alphabetic writing. It takes a lot of practice to reliably decode messages from
alphabetic writing to the spoken word.
I remember the first
time I coached a Little League baseball team of several kids that had various
Latin names. One in particular gave me great difficulty—Ramirez. It took me
several weeks to get from RAM-i-rez. To Ra-MIR-ez.
In fact, some of
those who try to learn to read alphabetic writing never master it because they
can't separate the speech string into individual segments, which are clusters
of vocal gestures in consonants and vowels. This is what leads to accents among
people in the U.S. who speak English as a second language, which is especially
true among those who speak languages based on Latin spelling (pronunciation),
such as Spanish, Italian, Japanese, etc., where vowels always have the same sound,
since English is a conglomeration of several language pronunciations with
numerous sounds for each vowel. As an example, English has 44 different sounds:
19 vowel sounds, including 5 long vowels, 5 short vowels, 3 dipthongs, 2 “oo”
sounds, 4 “r” controlled vowel sounds and 25 consonant sounds, plus 19 blend
sounds, 7 digraph sounds, and odd balls (like “zh” as in vision).
When you compare that
to Latin vowels, “a” is always “ah,” “e” is always “eh” (though occasionally
sounds like a hard “a”); “i” is always a hard “e”; “o” is always “oh,” and “u”
is always “oo,” with the dipthongs of “a” and “i” creating the sound “eye, ”
“a” and “u” creating “ou” as in “house,” “o” and “e” as “ay” in “say.”
The Norman conquest
(1066 A.D.) and its aftermath changed the entire social and government
structure, bringing French into the language, and removing Wessex English and
replacing it with London English. As an example, the “c,” which had always had
a “k” sound, now also had an “s” sound, as in “curb,” and “city,” and the “g”
took on a “j” sound as well as its normal hard “g” sound, as in goat and
gesture.
As Oxford and
Cambridge grew in prominence away from London, the language of the 1300s took
on an even greater change, with their different dialects governing the Age of
Learning in England. This triangle of London-Oxford-Cambridge, with its
revolving scholarly and clerical workforce, became a large and important center
of developing orthographic norms. Then came the printing press in the 1400s
which drastically changed the speed at which manuscripts could be produced and
therefore disseminated, and the adoption of paper also helped to make written
documents cheaper and more widespread.
Left: Chancery Lane where (Right) Chancery
Court was held in the 16th century, and now used by the Institute of
Actuaries today
These factors
encouraged the growth of record-keeping and bureaucracy and the continued
growth in importance of the Court of Chancery and Chancery English. Property
records, tax-collecting and other financial records, laws, and records of crime
and punishment all burgeoned in the 1500s. The rise of schools, designed to
train not only religious workers but also secular clerical workers for
government, made it possible to train larger numbers of people in literacy and
thereby also further spread the developing norms for orthography. The growth of
London and its role in public institutions ensured its importance as the center
of a linguistic standard for the developing nation.
Standard
written norms based on London English developed and were used even where local
pronunciations were hardly affected by the sounds of spoken London English.
Documents moved around in far greater volume and speed, even more than people
and thus could influence the norms of the region more easily than the spoken
dialect features of travelers. The growth of a professionalized class of printers
outside of the direct control of church and government led to the role of
printers in setting norms of writing and spelling, who had a strong interest in
standardization to reduce variation and hence make the printing process easier.
The printing profession evolved
into the profession of publishing, and publishers have been important ever
since in the setting of written standards.
During the 1500s, a major
upheaval in the pronunciation of English vowels, the Great English Vowel shift,
spread through the speech community and tore the conservative written forms of
the long vowels away from their changing pronunciations, leaving English with a
set of letter-to-written vowel correspondences different from everywhere else
in Europe, as well as internal variation that bedevils readers in pairs like divine,
divinity. In addition, many inflectional endings were reduced and
finally eliminated, notably many final unstressed e's. These "silent
e's" were continued in the spelling system but repurposed as a tool to
signal the value of the long vowels changed in the Great Vowel Shift (i.e., the silent "e" ending made the earlier vowel "long" or "hard" as in mate,
name, while etc.)
Other sounds were reduced then
eliminated, such as the k's and g's in the old clusters kn and gn (as in knight
and gnat) and some of the remnants of Old English yogh, the old velar
fricative (as in neighbor and bough). The result is the numerous
set of "silent letters" that those trying to learn English today find
so maddening.
By 1600, under the impetus of
printing the tremendous variety of spellings in written English had shaken down
into a far smaller set of variants, and a great part of the outlines of the
modern orthography was in place. Changes in orthographic norms slowed
considerably, and Modern English was left with a spelling system from an
earlier period of its history: essentially it is a normalized Middle English
system. The result is a set of letter-to-sound mismatches greater than those of
elsewhere in Europe, even in some respects greater than those of French, whose
spelling was codified a little later.
The introduction of the
Reformation and Renaissance as part of a new, Protestant England, created the need
for new doctrine and its administration, new documents, and liturgies for the
recently-established Church of England, the Book of Common Prayer, and above
all, English translations and copies of the Bible.
As the American colonies grew and
separated from England, a push was made to identify distinguishing cultural
factors and language that would separate Americans from Britons, since a
recognizable set of American pronunciation features had already developed. However,
instead of using pronunciation differences to try to develop a separate written
standard, Noah Webster wrote a dictionary in 1828 that containing some regional,
American-dialect based definitions to set it apart, and also introduced into
his dictionary and other writings a set of spellings that put a distinctive
stamp on American orthography without changing it too much for mutual
intelligibility.
In
other words, most of the spelling conventions that had solidified in the
British standard written form by the early 19th century were maintained by
Webster in his 1828 American Dictionary
of the English Language, but he added a few systematic differences: Using -ize
instead of -ise for verbs derived from Greek verbs in -izein;
eliminating u in the suffix -our (thus moving it away from the
French-derived spelling of Middle English to a spelling somewhat more in line
with pronunciation on both sides of the Atlantic), the replacement of -re
in French loans by -er (centre/center, theatre/theater) and a few
other simplifications.
Movements advocating more drastic
spelling reform of English emerged in the 18th century, and there are periodic
resurgences of this trend, which represents an attempt to introduce efficiency
and save time for new learners. Benjamin Franklin devised an alphabetic system
largely keeping English orthography the same but introducing single symbols for
the current digraphs, and additional symbols for vowel distinctions not
systematically represented in the writing system. George
Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was a passionate advocate of total spelling reform and
left his entire estate to be devoted to this project in 1950.
The
point of all of this is for us to recognize that the period of time that Joseph
Smith lived, and translated the Book of Mormon, was during one of the greatest
movements of change known in the English language, even more so than the changes
resulting from the Conquest (1066) and the Great Vowel Shift (1350-1700).
During this time in the early 1800s, the language, spelling, grammar, etc.,, were
all changing rapidly, with few people having the same understanding of any
regularity to rules and guidelines.
Thus,
when we look at the original writing of the Book of Mormon, and compare it to
today, we see an enormous amount of "errors" in the grammar, spelling, word
meanings, etc., many of which have already been changed to especially bring the
grammar and spelling into a modern reading syntax and orthography.
(Beginning
in the next post is the subject of Royal Skousen’s Critical Text Project,
which, after these last three posts about language of Joseph Smith’s time, will
make more sense and, we hope, our responses more meaningful)
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