Defending the Faith: Top Book of Mormon expert Royal Skousen to lecture

Deseret News ^ | Feb. 7, 2013 | Daniel Peterson

[Colofornian]

Readers along Utah’s Wasatch Front will have a rare opportunity to hear from the foremost expert on the history of the text of the Book of Mormon between late February and the middle of March.

In a series titled “25 Years of Research: What We Have Learned about the Book of Mormon Text,” professor Royal Skousen will discuss “The Original and Printer’s Manuscripts” (Tuesday, Feb. 26), “The Printed Editions” (Tuesday, March 5) and “The Nature of the Original Text” (Tuesday, March 12).

A professor of linguistics and English language at BYU, Skousen is the founder of the “analogical modeling” approach to linguistics and the author of several technical books on that subject...

Among Latter-day Saints, though, he’s best known for having devoted a quarter of a century to meticulous study of the creation of the English text of the Book of Mormon and its transmission thereafter.

There is, quite simply, no person on the planet who knows more about this subject than Royal Skousen, and there never has been. He’s published the results of his research in numerous articles and several large volumes, as well as in his Yale University Press edition of “The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text,” which appeared in 2009.

And his findings are fascinating.

Glitches that have crept into the text...

SNIP

Intriguingly, too, Skousen (a specialist, be it remembered, in linguistics and the English language) contends that the language of the Book of Mormon isn’t Joseph Smith’s early 19th-century dialect, but English of the 1500s and 1600s. Indeed, certain elements of Book of Mormon vocabulary may derive from a period prior to the King James Bible — which is certainly something to ponder.

[Utah Binger]

Well alright then.