A recent Interpreter article on affirmative past tense syntax in the Book of Mormon has been brought to my intention by the unstainable SteelHead. I have perused it, and despite some methodological misgivings and its questionable interpretation of data, I am impressed.
This article shows how one particular syntactical feature—using "did" as an auxiliary to form a past tense (e.g. "they did wander")—occurs with such high frequency in the Book of Mormon and such low frequency elsewhere, that it must be meaningful. More than that, it is a syntactic construction whose heyday was centuries before Joseph Smith, and thus it would have been, as one scornful dog has barked, "naturalistically inaccessible." The implication is this:
We have seen that some who intentionally tried to follow King James English in their writings did not match 16c adp did usage. Their efforts do not positively correlate with that stage of English: Snowden’s The American Revolution, Hunt’s The Late War, and Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews ended up well off the mark. Sixteenth-century texts were not readily available in the 1820s as they became later in the 19c. As a result, the access to the relevant texts was extremely limited in the 1820s, especially to someone living away from populated eastern cities with research libraries. And the 16c printed books containing the heavy use of this syntax were still largely to be found only in British libraries. So a compelling position — on account of the lack of any specific, credible evidence to the contrary — is that the words of the Book of Mormon were revealed to Joseph Smith through the instrument, that they came from a divine source.
Despite the somewhat convoluted syntax of this syntactician's concluding sentence, I think the gist is clear: the presence of this syntactic pattern is a sure sign of the Lord's handiwork. And it came to pass that Brother Carmack did do well.
And then it came to pass that it did occur to me: we Latter-day Saints are commanded to seek words of wisdom, by study and by faith out of the best books (cf. D &C 88:118 or thereabouts). But how, I wondered, can we determine what the best books are?
This brilliant work, proving that God first acquired fluent acquaintance with the English tongue in about the late 16th century or so, I think points the way. For, if any occurrence of this syntactic pattern after the early 18th century (when this syntactic pattern disappeared, according to the paper) is a sign of a "divine source," then perhaps any text that has this pattern also has that same divine source.
It so happens, my friends, that I have chanced upon such a text—one of those best books, I think, out of which I now encourage all of you diligently to seek words of wisdom, even by study and by faith or their nearest reasonably accessible equivalents. What is this book? It is an issue of the Columbia Chess Chronicle ("The Only Weekly Paper in America Devoted Entirely to Chess"), from the week of January 15, 1888.
From this issue, we no doubt learn some of the Lord's choice chess openings and end games, and characteristic of the popular magazines of the era, it is full of a variety of diversions and delights, from poetry to stories. I believe there may also be a revelation from God within its pages, or at least words of wisdom. On pp. 215-16, we read the account of the Ye Ancient Chronicles of the Land of Gotham. That is, of course, New York, which, as you know, is a possible candidate for some of the Book of Mormon's more serious carnage. It recounts the origins of New York's chess clubs, and the sad and ancient feud that separated them. Note also that this is a chess, where the war between the delightsome forces of white and the forces of black is the name of the game (when the name of that game is not "chess"), which, as Nibley has pointed out, is one of the great themes of Jaredite history, as it was also of Nephite history. These are matters of deep import.
It is only two pages in this issue, but what strikes the alert reader is not merely the archaic, Elizabethan era spellings (e.g. "mightie"), nor the Hebraisms ("I have bought me" rather than "I have bought myself," as well as parallelisms and ring composition), nor the repetition of "it came to pass" (also a Hebraisms, no doubt), but above all the unlikely high frequency of past-tense affirmative syntax with "did." This is a marker of the Elizabethan London dialect of English that the Lord speaks.
Now, what has led Carmack to the conclusion that the Book of Mormon is in the Lord's dialect of English is the text's high frequency of such syntax: 27% of all past-tense narrative verbs employ the "did" form of the past tense in the Book of Mormon, as compared to only 2% in the KJB. Other sources, such as View of the Hebrews, are insignificant. Thus, this archaic 16th century feature, which Carmack assures us could not have been detected by Joseph Smith, although it does occur in the KJB, is a marker of a divine source.
I followed Carmack's strictures for the most part, omitting past tense of "to be" and passive forms, neither of which can take a "did" form. In Ye Ancient Chronicles of Gotham, there are roughly 67 past-tense narrative verbs along these lines, and of those I have detected 33 examples of affirmative past-tense syntax with "did." That is an astonishing 49%!
The objection might be raised that Ye Ancient Chronicles of Gotham are post-Book of Mormon, and at a time when 16th century texts were more widely available. Yet, any theory that posits that the Book of Mormon is responsible for this must surmount some insurmountable problems. For one thing, the Book of Mormon was a text of an extremely unpopular religious sect at the time (this is 1888), and for another it was a text that was not even widely read by that sect until the mid 20th century, much less among the wider American public. And there is no evidence of the Book of Mormon's influence within the pages of this or any other obtainable issue of the Columbia Chess Chronicle. Moreover, this feature of syntax was undetected even in the Bible until a Swedish linguist in the 20th century discovered it, and it was not known to be a feature of the Book of Mormon until Brother Carmack's work just this year. So, if the writer(s) of this story were so deeply influenced by the Book of Mormon that they detected within it an extremely archaic feature of English syntax that was not otherwise detected in that book until 2015, then why doesn't this influence appear elsewhere?
Finally, it is possible that some will have noticed that the Book of Mormon's 27% is higher than the KJB's 2%, and this wide range difference suggests to Carmack that Joseph Smith could not have appropriated this particular syntactic feature from the KJB. But notice too that 49% is higher than 27%, and thus by the same reasoning we can be assured that the writer of the Ye Ancient Chronicles of Gotham got hold of this archaic syntactic feature neither from the KJB nor the Book of Mormon, and certainly not from View of the Hebrews or the works of James Fenimore Cooper.
So, to invoke the reasoning of Brother Carmack: a compelling position—on account of the lack of any specific, credible evidence to the contrary (argumentum e silentio)—is that the words of Ye Ancient Chronicles of Gotham were revealed to the editors of the Columbia Chess Chronicle through the instrument, that they came from a divine source.
