Several years ago, I became interested in second-person pronouns in the Book of Mormon. These are the words we use when talking about the person we're talking to, such as “you are looking great today!” In modern English, we have five: you, your, yours, yourself, and yourselves. But early modern English used ten: five for talking to one person (“thou”, “thee”, “thy”, “thine”, and “thyself”), and five for talking to a group of people (“ye”, “you”, “your”, “yours”, “yourselves”). Although we don't use most of these anymore, there is one which we use now that wasn't used before: “yourself”. It's a weird word because it uses both plural and singular forms in the same word, which really doesn't make sense in early modern English.
But the Book of Mormon uses it. Which … it shouldn't. In fact, nearly one-in-ten second-person pronouns in the Book of Mormon are used incorrectly, such as when Alma is speaking with his son Helaman in Alma 37:20: “Therefore I command you, my son Helaman, that ye be diligent in fulfilling all my words…” etc. He's clearly speaking to Helaman and only Helaman, yet plural pronouns are being used. Interestingly, despite several editions of the Book of Mormon where grammatical errors were corrected, these pronouns come out relatively unscathed, with less than 1 percent of them being changed, and those not always for the better.
I was curious where these errors came from. Are they there because of Joseph Smith's poor education? Were the errors introduced by the scribes working with Joseph? Or, perhaps, are they original to the Book of Mormon? After considering for a while, I realized that there is a possibility of finding out: if the error rate changes with each ancient author who contributed to the Book of Mormon, then the errors are most likely to have come from the original ancient authors in the Book of Mormon. This is a gamble, because if the error rate is consistent throughout, then it doesn't tell us anything; the errors could be modern in origin or they could have come from Mormon and Moroni who abridged the Nephite records, or they could be due to a combination of modern and ancient errors.
I've been studying this off-and-on for several years now, and thought it was about time that I presented my findings.
Authorship
The first step was to identify which authors wrote which parts of the Book of Mormon. This is a little odd, because everything may have been re-written by Mormon and Moroni, but I chose to look at who was originally writing down each section. Authors which share a name are distinguished by a parenthetical number after the author. When an author change happens within a verse, the word number is indicated by parentheses after the verse. Book or chapter headings that appear to have been original to the Book of Mormon (and not added in later) are given and chapter or verse number of '0'.
| Section Start | Section End | Author |
|---|---|---|
| Title Page | Title Page | Mormon |
| 1 Nephi 0:1 | 1 Nephi 19:24 | Nephi (1) |
| 1 Nephi 20:1 | 1 Nephi 21:26 | Isaiah |
| 1 Nephi 22:1 | 2 Nephi 6:6 (6) | Nephi (1) |
| 2 Nephi 6:6 (7) | 2 Nephi 6:7 | Isaiah |
| 2 Nephi 6:8 | 2 Nephi 6:16 (1) | Nephi (1) |
| 2 Nephi 6:16 (2) | 2 Nephi 8:25 | Isaiah |
| 2 Nephi 9:1 | 2 Nephi 11:8 | Nephi (1) |
| 2 Nephi 12:1 | 2 Nephi 24:32 | Isaiah |
| 2 Nephi 25:1 | 2 Nephi 27:2 (6) | Nephi (1) |
| 2 Nephi 27:2 (7) | 2 Nephi 27:35 | Isaiah |
| 2 Nephi 28:1 | 2 Nephi 33:15 | Nephi (1) |
| Jacob 0:1 | Jacob 7:27 | Jacob |
| Enos 1:1 | Enos 1:27 | Enos |
| Jarom 1:1 | Jarom 1:27 | Jarom |
| Omni 1:1 | Omni 1:3 | Omni |
| Omni 1:4 | Omni 1:8 | Amaron |
| Omni 1:9 | Omni 1:9 | Chemish |
| Omni 1:10 | Omni 1:11 | Abinadom |
| Omni 1:12 | Omni 1:30 | Amaleki |
| Words of Mormon 1:1 | Words of Mormon 1:18 | Mormon |
| Mosiah 1:1 | Mosiah 8:21 | Mosiah |
| Mosiah 9:0 | Mosiah 10:22 | Zeniff |
| Mosiah 11:1 | Mosiah 14:1 (6) | Mosiah |
| Mosiah 14:1 (7) | Mosiah 14:12 | Isaiah |
| Mosiah 15:1 | Mosiah 29:47 | Mosiah |
| Alma 0:1 | Alma 44:24 | Alma |
| Alma 45:0 | Alma 62:52 | Helaman (1) |
| Alma 63:1 | Alma 63:17 | Shiblon |
| Helaman 0:1 | Helaman 3:37 | Helaman (2) |
| Helaman 3:37 | Helaman 16:25 | Nephi (2) |
| 3 Nephi 0:1 | 3 Nephi 22:1 | Nephi (3) |
| 3 Nephi 22:1 | 3 Nephi 22:17 | Isaiah |
| 3 Nephi 23:1 | 3 Nephi 24:1 (59) | Nephi (3) |
| 3 Nephi 24:1 (60) | 3 Nephi 25:6 | Malachi |
| 3 Nephi 26:1 | 3 Nephi 26:5 | Nephi (3) |
| 3 Nephi 26:6 | 3 Nephi 26:13 | Mormon |
| 3 Nephi 26:14 | 3 Nephi 28:16 | Nephi (3) |
| 3 Nephi 28:17 | 3 Nephi 30:2 | Mormon |
| 4 Nephi 0:1 | 4 Nephi 1:19 (23) | Nephi (3) |
| 4 Nephi 1:19 (24) | Mormon 7:10 | Mormon |
| Mormon 8:1 | Moroni 10:34 | Moroni |
This analysis of Book of Mormon authorship does not match what other people have come up with. In particular, the authorship used by Wayne A. Larsen and Alvin C. Rencher in their wordprint analysis study of the Book of Mormon, Who Wrote the Book of Mormon?, includes Jesus, Lord, Father, and Angel as "authors", whose words were actually written by others. I think this is a good conversation to have. I defined 'author' as one who physically wrote down something, and I also went through and identified 'speakers' throughout the Book of Mormon. However, I did not find that it made a noticeable difference whether I ran my pronoun analysis using 'speaker' or 'author', so I am only including the results of the 'author' analysis here.
Larsen and Rencher also came up with very different word counts for many authors. A significant part of this is that it appears they believe that Mormon wrote most of the book of Alma, only quoting Alma's words directly occasionally. I don't agree, so it seems worth noting that the identification of authorship appears somewhat subjective.
Pronouns
After identifying authors, I categorized each pronoun as definitely correct, probably correct, unclear, probably wrong, and definitely wrong. I also cross-referenced Royal Skousen's book “The Book of Mormon: The Original Text” for any changes from the earliest translation.
Nephi, son of Lehi
Looking at the Book of Mormon authors chronologically (ignoring for now those that also appear in the Old Testament), we begin with Nephi the son of Lehi. Of 691 second-person pronouns, 11 are definitely wrong, 4 are probably wrong, 40 could be either way, 19 are probably correct, and the remaining 617 are definitely correct. Taking the definitely wrong pronouns as a low estimate and adding the probably wrong for a high, that gives us an error rate of between 1.6% and 2.1%. We will see that this is the smallest error rate. Nephi, by his own admission, was well-educated, so that makes sense.
Jacob
Next is Jacob. He was born in the wilderness after they left Jerusalem, so probably did not have the same learning opportunities as his older brother. He used 211 of these pronouns, with 5 definitely wrong and 1 probably wrong. (For simplicity, I'm not going to mention the numbers for unclear, probably correct, and definitely correct, though they are included in the charts.) This gives us an error rate between 2.4 and 2.8%—just slightly higher.
Enos
Jacob's son Enos is next. He did not write very much, so we only have 20 of these pronouns to work from. None are definitely wrong, but 2 are probably wrong, giving us a wide-ranging error rate between 0 and 10%. If he had written more, we could have narrowed it down some.
Jarom, Omni, Amaron, Amaleki
Next we have Jarom, Omni, Amaron, and Amaleki, who each wrote only a few words. Between them they used only 11 of these pronouns, which really isn't enough to tell anything, so we're going to ignore them. But in case you're wondering, they were all used correctly. If their error rates had been the same as Jacob's, then 0.3 of them would have been incorrect, which is essentially zero, so this is within expectations.
These four authors represent a couple hundred years of Nephite history, which gives a long time for a language to shift.
Mosiah
The next author we find, Mosiah, was a third-generation king and prophet over a bilingual civilization in Zarahemla. Being a king, we can expect him to be educated so that his error rate might be low; however, being in a bilingual civilization, we can expect that his error rate might be much higher. Out of 689 of these pronouns, 39 were definitely wrong, and 11 probably wrong, for an error rate of between 5.7% and 7.3%—significantly higher than his predecessors.
Zeniff
Zeniff wrote down a history which is included in the book of Mosiah, but used no second-person pronouns.
Alma
Alma, often referred to nowadays as Alma the younger, is next. He wrote a lot, including 1,427 of these pronouns. 215 of them are clearly wrong, with another 34 probably wrong, giving a total error rate of between 15.1 and 17.4%. This is another big jump, more than double that of any preceding author, even though he played with King Mosiah's children! Does that make sense?
Alma's father was raised in a Nephite settlement that had been under Lamanite rule for his entire life, and possibly the life of his father, as well. The Lamanites and Nephites by this time no longer spoke the same language (see Mosiah 24:3-4), so Alma's father probably spoke a pidgin Lamanite/Nephite dialect. One of the distinguishing traits of pidgin languages is simplified grammatical structures.
Alma the younger himself grew up in Zarahemla, which was already bilingual before Alma's pidgin-speaking group joined. So we can see that Alma the younger grew up in a linguistically diverse society. We can catch a glimpse of these language problems in Alma 7:1, where Alma the younger says, “therefore I attempt to address you in my language”. So, yes, this higher pronoun error rate is completely understandable—even expected. It is also Alma who introduces the out-of-place pronoun “yourself”—which makes sense if his language or dialect had at least partially lost the plural/singular distinction like we have.
Helaman
Alma the younger is followed by his son, Helaman. Helaman used 229 of these pronouns, with 20 being definitely wrong and 40 probably wrong, for an error rate of between 8.7 and 26.2%. This is a very large spread, mostly due to a lot of ambiguity in the epistles that he quotes. Regardless, the error rate is in line with that of his father, which again makes sense.
Helaman, son of Helaman
Helaman's son, Helaman, then takes over, but only uses one of these types of pronouns (correctly, in case you're wondering). That's not enough to determine an error rate, so we're going to skip him.
Nephi, son of Helaman
He is followed by another Nephi, who used 419 of these pronouns with an error rate of 5.7%. This seems like quite a drop; why is his error rate back to that of Mosiah's? According to the Migration Policy Institute, “the experiences of European groups coming to the United States in the early 20th century suggest that full assimilation generally occurs within three to four generations”. Well, this Nephi is the fourth generation, so again this fits perfectly. It's too bad his father didn't write more so that we could see whether the shift was gradual or sudden, perhaps even get a glimpse into how well childhood-Nephi got along with dad-Helaman.
Nephi, son of Nephi
Nephi the son of Helaman is followed by his son, another Nephi, who used 692 of these pronouns with an error rate between 1.4 and 13.4%. A wide spread again, but in keeping with his father's error rate.
Mormon
Mormon and Moroni finish off the list, several hundreds of years later. Mormon was the primary abridger of the Nephite history, and so his mark may well be found throughout the Book of Mormon, intentionally or otherwise. It is difficult to say which parts he quoted and which he summarized, particularly from the book of Mosiah onward. For the times when he was clearly writing on his own, he used 136 second-person pronouns, with an error rate of 6.6%.
Moroni
Moroni, son of Mormon, had the dubious honor of being the last author in the Book of Mormon. He also summarized the entire history of the Jaredites, which was surely no easy feat. In his writings, he used 486 second-person pronouns, with an error rate of between 7.6 and 8.4%.
Summary
Let's step back a bit. When I started this, I honestly did not expect anything like this. I was hoping to see minor variations in pronoun error rates by author due to personal differences in attention to detail. Instead, I found that not only do the pronoun error rates change dramatically, they point to shifts in the underlying language that correlate well with cultural changes of the times. That we can use the grammar of the Book of Mormon to tease out historical context is both surprising and fascinating to me.
Although Joseph Smith and his scribes may have introduced some of these errors, the best explanation for the majority of the inconsistent pronoun usage appears to be that it is a faithful translation of what was found on the plates. To me, it also points to a better answer to the question, “Why was the Book of Mormon written with all those ‘thee's and ‘thou's?” Without them, this pattern would be lost. And, more importantly, there are times when it actually matters. I'll get to that another time, when I talk about prosperity.