“And behold, I swear unto you, if ye will do this, with an oath, ye shall not be destroyed; but if ye will not do this, I swear unto you with an oath, that on the morrow month I will command that my armies shall come down against you, and they shall not stay their hand and shall spare not, but shall slay you, and shall let fall the sword upon you even until ye shall become extinct.”

It was a few years ago that the peculiarity of Giddianhi’s ultimatum really stood out to me for the first time.

As an English major with a particular interest in literature written before the 20th century, I had read a variety of texts from the Old English, Middle English, Renaissance, Early Modern,18th and 19th Century periods. At the time I had been reading a great deal of early American writing, often in the original spelling and grammar, which had been written between 1500 and 1860. I had just finished a handful of books published around the time when Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon and the phrase “…on the morrow month…” in Giddianhi’s letter really stuck out as an unusual construction.

I wondered if “on the morrow month” was in common usage in the 19th century, when Joseph was translating the Nephite record, but had since fallen out of use. Or maybe it was a construction adapted from the Jacobean language of the King James Bible. I had never run into it in any of my other reading, so I started to investigate.

Now, I’m not a scholar, and this is a blog post not a thesis, so I’ll leave it to the professionals to look into it more rigorously if they desire, but here is what I found:

The word morrow derives from the Old English word morgen meaning “morning” (which Dutch and German speakers will recognize as a cognate). In Middle English the word became morwen. Eventually the ‘-en’ was dropped, in the same way that it was dropped in the word maiden to give us the word maid, and morw became morrow through the natural process of pronunciation.

Even though they were sometimes combined as early as 1500, the word tomorrow was usually written as separate words “to morrow” until the 1750s, and started to be used to mean “the next day” as early as 1275.

So morrow and tomorrow refer to the morning and by extension the next day. Month, on the other hand is derived from the cycle of the phases of the moon. The Oxford English dictionary doesn’t have any examples of either morrow or tomorrow becoming divorced from their relationship to “morning” and used as generic terms to indicate the next period of any time measurement, like a month. So Joseph Smith’s translation of Giddianhi’s ultimatum seems to be far outside the standard English usage of morrow.

Of course, just because it’s not in the Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t mean that it has never been used this way, so I thought I do a little more digging. I started Google searches to try to find examples of the phrase “morrow month” unrelated to the Book of Mormon. I found a few instances worth noting.

The least obscure appearance of the words “morrow month” is in a lesser known poem by the famous Robert Browning called Time’s Revenges which he published in 1845, fifteen years after the Book of Mormon.  Here is the pertinent excerpt with added emphasis:

He does himself though,—and if some vein
Were to snap to-night in this heavy brain,
To-morrow month, if I lived to try,
Round should I just turn quietly,
Or out of the bedclothes stretch my hand
Till I found him, come from his foreign land
To be my nurse in this poor place,
And make my broth and wash my face
And light my fire and, all the while,
Bear with his old good-humoured smile

The earliest use I found was in volume 8 of the Journals of the House Of Commons published in 1803, but recorded from legislative records originating in the 1660s, where it is used twice:

“Ordered, That the Committee of Privileges and Elections do, on To-morrow Month, being the Twelfth of May next, proceed to hear and determine the Cause touching the Election for the Town of Newport in Cornwall between Mr Ford and Mr Edgcombe.“

“Resolved, &c. That the House be Called over again on To morrow Month, being the Six-and-twentieth Day of April next .”

One thing to notice is that these early occurrences in the Journal of the House of Commons refer to specific dates. The first one is recorded on the Julian calendar date Lunae 13 Aprilis 1663 and the second one on Lunae 28 Martii 1664. (Britian didn’t adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752)

“To-morrow Month” here seems to mean specifically the same day as tomorrow but in four weeks. So in the first case, recorded on Monday April 13th, the “to-morrow” would be Tuesday April 14th, plus a month would be Tuesday May 12th.

Here are is the Julian calendar for April and May 1663 with the dates colored to illustrate (blue = today, green = to-morrow, red = to-morrow month)

April 1663
Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su
       1  2  3  4  5
 6  7  8  9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30

May 1663
Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su
             1  2  3
 4  5  6  7  8  9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31

The same meaning is obvious in the second instance, in which “to morrow” refers to Tuesday March 29th, 1664 and the corresponding day in the next month is April 26th, just as the text states.

Looking back at Browning’s poem, he seems to be using it in this same way, although for poetic effect rather than to specify a particular date.

Another obscure use is in a 1911 book by Stephen Graham called A Vagabond in the Caucasus:

“Sleeping in the copse, even in more abundance than yesterday, are next month’s flowers: time and the sun are softly wooing them. A few mallow and lily and rose will have faded away and given place to new revellers, new festivities. The morning sun, warmer every moment, promises for to-morrow, to-morrow week, to-morrow month, the blooming of the poppy and the ripening of the vine.”

Like Browning, Graham appears to be drawing upon the obscure usage we see in the previous legalistic Journals for poetic effect, with the addition of a progression from tomorrow, to the same day next week, and then to the corresponding day next month. And like Browning, it post-dates the publication of The Book of Mormon.

Another interesting example is from Sweated industry and the minimum wage, published by Clementia Black in 1907:

“In many shops that meal is neither good nor sufficient; and even if good the food is monotonous. Each day of the week has generally its appointed bill of fare. In many houses the assistants know what the dinner will be to-morrow, to-morrow week, to-morrow month, to-morrow year. I have an Islington shop in my mind where the menu for years past has been this:– Sunday: Pork. Monday: Beef, hot. Tuesday: Beef, cold. Wednesday: Mutton, hot. Thursday: Mutton, cold. Friday: Beef, hot. Saturday: Beef, cold, and resurrection pie.”

All of these examples are consistent with the etymology of to-morrow because they are referring specifically to the next morning or next day of the week, and then referencing that same day of the week in the subsequent week, month, or year.

There are a handful of other examples of this “to-morrow month” construction in works previous to, contemporary with, and after Joseph Smith’s publication of The Book of Mormon.

But the Book of Mormon text doesn’t use “on to-morrow month”.  It says “on the morrow month”.  If we add the definite article to the search and exclude Book of Mormon citations, we come up with some false positives because Google does not differentiate between punctuation, so that “the morrow month” is treated the same as “the morrow. Month” and “the morrow, month” by the search. Once the false positives are excluded, we find that there isn’t a single literary instance of “the morrow month” outside of citations of the Book of Mormon itself.

This suggests a few possibilities:

1. Invention

Joseph Smith came up with a completely unique use of the word morrow when translating the Book of Mormon which changes its meaning to “next” or “proximate” instead of “morning.” The word occurs 41 times in the text of the Book of Mormon, and in all other cases follows the standard usage. Nobody else before or after him has used the word in this idiosyncratic way.

2. Transcription Error

The original translation of 3rd Nephi chapter 3 might have read “…I swear unto you with an oath, that on to morrow month I will command that my armies…” and it might have been subsequently changed accidentally to the when being copied for printing. In this case, Giddianhi would have been naming a specific date on which he would command the attack, and not just a fuzzy “next month”. However, my copy of Royal Skousen’s The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text does not show that he has identified any changes to 3rd Nephi Chapter 3 Verse 8. In the image of the 1828 printer’s manuscript below, it says “on the morrow month” though that doesn’t mean that it didn’t say “on to morrow month” in the original dictation. It is interesting, however, that the word month appears to have been crossed out and then replaced again for some reason in the printer’s manuscript. This may indicate that someone recognized the unusual construction and started to change it by removing month, but then decided for some reason that it should stay, though that is pure speculation.

3. Hebraism

Maybe “morrow month” is somehow related to the the Jewish Machar Chodesh which means literally “Tomorrow Month” or “Tomorrow New Moon”. When the Sabbath falls on the New Moon it is customary to read 1st Samuel 20:18 in which, in the KJV translation, Jonathan says to David, “To morrow is the new moon: and thou shalt be missed, because thy seat will be empty.” From what I understand, the Jewish people refer to these New-Moon Sabbaths with the words of Jonathan taken from this text. We could speculate that the words Machar Chodesh evolved in the Nephite language into a name for the next new moon, or the next sabbath on a new moon. Additionally, though machar is translated as “morrow” in the KJV, it is also translated in more vague terms as “in time to come” (see for instance Joshua 4:6). So it is possible that “morrow month” is an awkward English representation of what is a more natural construction in the Nephite language that evolved from Hebrew.

4. Insufficient Information

Perhaps I have missed something that shows that “on the morrow month” is in fact used elsewhere in English, and that it would have been familiar to Joseph Smith and his 19th century audience.

Perhaps some people with more knowledge and experience in these subjects than I have can investigate these or other possibilities further. Whatever the case, this peculiar little phrase appears to be unique to the Book of Mormon, and demonstrates that the text is more complicated and original than a cursory reading suggests.

Please feel free to share any additional insights or ideas.

While the sample size only represents 4% of books ever published, and the approach is often limited by the complexity of language usage, the project offers a fascinating (not to mention fun!) look not just into language, but into comparative cultural trends, historical events, fads, celebrity, and influence.

And best of all, Google has provided a free web-based interface so that anyone can play around with Ngram searches.

For instance, the Ngram Viewer can be used to compare the usage of the terms Mormon vs LDS:

When I first became aware of the tool on Friday, one of the first things I thought of was what the angel Moroni said about the prophet Joseph Smith’s name when he first appeared to the prophet:

“He called me by name, and said unto me that he was a messenger sent from the presence of God to me, and that his name was Moroni; that God had a work for me to do; and that my name should be had for good and evil among all nations, kindreds, and tongues, or that it should be both good and evil spoken of among all people.”

I also remembered the first verse of the revelation contained in section 122 of the book of Doctrine and Covenants where the Lord declares of Joseph Smith:

“The ends of the earth shall inquire after thy name, and fools shall have thee in derision, and hell shall rage against thee;”

Joseph Smith was born on December 23, 1805; 205 years go this week. I thought it would be interesting to see what the Ngram Viewer could show concerning these prophecies about the prophet’s name compared to some other comparable religious and spiritual figures, as well as a few other influential or famous thinkers and historical characters.

After playing around with various names, I settled on the following names to compare to Joseph Smith:

• Abraham Lincoln – The 16th President of the United States
• Charles Darwin – the father of the Theory of Evolution
• Karl Marx – considered the Father of Communism
• Sigmund Freud – the father of modern Psychotherapy
• Ann Lee –  the founder of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, also called the Shaking Quakers or Shakers, in the U. S. in the 1770s.  Doctrine & Covenants Section 49 is directed at the Shakers.
• Emanuel Swedenborg – a well known Christian mystic in the late 1700s whose visions and theology have sometimes been compared to Joseph Smith.  His disciples included the father of Henry and William James. He also influenced Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Butler Yeats, Johnny Appleseed, Carl Jung, Helen Keller, and other well known figures.
• Mary Baker Eddy – the founder of Christian Science in the late 1800s
• Ellen White – visionary founder of the Seventh Day Adventists in the late 1800s
• Charles Russell –  the founder of the Zion’s Watch Tower Tract Society in the late 1800s, which later became the Jehovah’s Witnesses
• Adolf Hitler – Infamous leader of the  National Socialist German Workers Party
• Emily Dickinson – the reclusive American poet

Here are the combined results for the search:

According to this measure, Abraham Lincoln clearly has produced the greatest and longest lasting discussion among this selection.  After many years of decline, he was briefly surpassed by Karl Marx after the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and a decade or so later Freud, who had been steadily increasing, was also comparable to Lincoln.  Thankfully, Lincoln began to regain ground in the 1980s and has continued to do so, while Marx simultaneously declined at about the same rate as Lincoln’s resurgence, and Freud has been in decline since about the mid-1990s.

(As an aside, it is interesting that the references to Karl Marx began a steady decline about a decade before the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and the end of the cold war. I wonder what kinds of predictions we might try based on current trends?)

How does Joseph Smith fare by this measure?  Interestingly, he is most comparable to Charles Darwin, Emily Dickinson, and Adolf Hitler (after the 1950s).   If you are talking about names that  are “had for good and evil among all nations ” and names after which “the ends of the earth shall inquire,” being in the company of the names like Darwin, Dickinson, and Hitler is quite impressive. Especially contrasted with the other religious founders in this group.

Here are individual charts for Joseph Smith and each other individual:

Joseph Smith vs Abraham Lincoln

Joseph Smith vs Charles Darwin

Joseph Smith vs Karl Marx

Joseph Smith vs Sigmund Freud

Joseph Smith vs Ann Lee

Joseph Smith vs Emanuel Swedenborg

Joseph Smith vs Mary Baker Eddy

Joseph Smith vs Ellen White

Joseph Smith vs Charles Russell

Joseph Smith vs Adolf Hitler

Joseph Smith vs Emily Dickinson

In some ways it is hard to compare these names.  For instance, I am sure that there are numerous references to the prophet as “Joe Smith” or just “Smith” that are not found by searching for “Joseph Smith”.  There are also likely some Joseph Smiths that refer to individuals other than the prophet, but while a search for Joseph Smith Jr. would help exclude these, it would be too specific and miss all of the references to just Joseph Smith.  So I stuck with Joseph Smith.

I then applied a similar approach to the other names.  For instance, a search for “Hitler” or “Marx” would yield far more references than “Adolf Hitler” or “Karl Marx,” but because I can’t search for just “Smith” for Joseph Smith, I decided to only search for the highest yielding version of  each individual’s full name.  In some cases, like Charles Russell and Ellen White, that meant excluding middle names for the same reason that I excluded the Jr. for Joseph Smith, even though they may accidentally include others with the same name.  In the case of Mary Baker Eddy, however, including the middle name produced higher results than without, so I used that name.

This is hardly a comprehensive study.  It’s just a blog post based on my own messing around with the Ngram Viewer during a few hours.  The viewer has numerous options. You can select different collections of books and languages, and change the way it averages the data.  I ran all of my comparisons using the default English corpus and a smoothing of 3. Switching the smoothing option to 0, for instance, results in a chart of the raw data:

You can learn more about how the Ngram Viewer works and what its different options do here.  There are still innumerable applications to this topic as well as many, many others.

Go play with it.  Then share what kinds of cool things you have tried.

UPDATE 12/19/2010

My friend Brian Duffin pointed out another interesting thing. If you search the Ngrams for “Jesus” there is a huge spike in the frequency of references to Jesus that starts just before 1800 and climbs rapidly to its highest points between 1810 and 1815, and while it fluctuates, it remains high until around 1842, after which it declines quickly, resurges briefly during the Civil War, and then steadily declines until nearly 1980. Since then it has been rapidly climbing, though not quite as fast as it did in the first decade of 1800.

Jesus

Interestingly, the highest spike corresponds to the years just before Joseph Smith’s birth in 1805 until he was about 10 or 11 years old. This lends support to the prophet’s declaration that in about 1817 “there was in the place where we lived an unusual excitement on the subject of religion.”  Apparently there was an unusual excitement, not just in the region where he lived, but in the English Language in general. The frontier folk may have been behind the trend by a few years.

Also interesting, the excitement remains relatively high throughout the prophet’s life, getting nearly has high toward the end of his life as the beginning, and then begins its rapid decline almost exactly when Joseph Smith is murdered in 1844.

Thanks Brian!

The other day I was reading through this copy of Tyndale’s New Testament and I found the following fascinating construction in St. Mark chapter 10:

And he sayde unto them: Whosoever putteth awaye his wyfe, and maryeth another, breaketh wedlocke to herwarde.

In modern English we would generally use the phrase “toward her” or depending on our dialect, “towards her.” But here Tyndale places the -ward suffix, indicating direction, on the pronoun!

This usage seems very awkward to our modern ears.  We do use the -ward suffix regularly.  We say “upward,” “downward, “backward,” and “forward.”  It even sounds perfectly fine to say “She looked heavenward” or “He tumbled earthward.”

Tyndale’s placement of the suffix on the pronoun seems completely foreign to us.  However, a search through the Standard version of King James Bible turns up examples of “to us-ward” and “to youward.”

Ironically, the word “awkward” itself is a fabulous use of the suffix.  The word “awk” means “turned in the opposite direction, backhanded, left handed, sinister, wrong, perverse, singular, distinguished, or clumsy.  So “awkward” means literally “in a backwards or opposite direction,” making it all the more applicable to Tyndale’s use of this fascinating suffix.

Your assignment today is to try some more creative uses of -ward in your everyday speech.  Instead of saying “He shot the ball toward the basket,” why not try “He shot the ball basketward.”  Or even try to resurrect the awkward pronoun use?

[Assy-thingummy is an ongoing blog series about words and language. Browse past Assy-thingummy entries here.]

Originally, Sixteen Small Stones was meant to be a place for me to write about any of my many interests and starting now I am going to return to that objective.  I will still be writing about politics and religion when I have something to say, but it will not be the only focus as it has been lately.

I love words and etymology.  I often come across fascinating words and word relationships.  Today I am introducing an onging series called “Assy-thingummy.”  The name Assy-thingummy comes from the book “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” by C. S. Lewis:

“I’m trying to think of a limerick, “said Eustace.

“Something like this:

Some kids who played games about Narnia Got gradually balmier and balmier–”

“Well, Narnia and balmier don’t rhyme, to begin with,” said Lucy.

“It’s an assonance, “said Eustace.

“Don’t ask him what an assy-thingummy is, “said Edmund. “He’s only longing to be asked.”

So Assy-thingummy posts will be about words, word relationships, and fun word facts.  I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I do!

Unlike the English version that had long been available online, these version do not include the Old or New Testaments, likely due to copyright constraints.

One great feature is the ability to switch between languages. If you are viewing a particular chapter in one language and want to switch to another, just click on the language in the upper right hand corner of the page and a little drop down list of available languages will pop up. Just select the language you want and the chapter will switch to that language.

When I was trying to learn Spanish as a missionary, I found it very helpful to read The Book of Mormon with an English copy side by side with a Spanish copy. With these new electronic versions, practicing this way is easier than ever before.

According to the LDSWebGuy blog more languages are on the way.

Excerpt:

One of the most amusing things about the movement to force immigrants to speak only English is that we have a much more serious language problem on our hands—and it’s centered in the universities.

There are whole departments where English has been effectively banned and replaced with “Theoretics,” a language designed so that the speaker can make the listener feel stupid without the speaker actually having to be smart.

Read the whole thing.