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Meaning? As an example, whoso(ever). The first whoso occurs at Helaman 13:18. I did not check to see which original chapter break yields the greatest rate difference, but it could be 3 Nephi 7 | 8. In any event, the shift is clear at that point, and it was the one I generally used because it was a good fit with various usage shifts. whoso whosoever % whoso Mosiah 1 to 3 Nephi 7 1 66 1.5 3 Nephi 8 to Words of Mormon 40 6 87.0

Every shift could be individually optimized to yield a highest Yates chi-square value. For my study, I have constrained shift points to coincide with books or original chapter breaks. I have calculated most shifts at 3 Nephi 7|8 (III | IV). The shift to conjunction save optimizes toward the end of Helaman or at the end of Helaman. The most well-known shift is therefore to wherefore, which optimizes to Ether 4 | 5 (4.4% wherefore » 90.3% wherefore). It does not matter in terms of statistical significance, but I have counted one dozen or so "and (now) therefore" as wherefore since that is one definition of the word and there are no "and|now wherefore" strings in the Book of Mormon. The transition from there to where occurs between er0210 and er0907 (n=43). The Ngram Viewer in Joseph Smith's time shows wherefore at less than 3% vs. therefore. That is also seen in his early letters and in his mother's book. The wherefore usage shift in the Book of Mormon reflects English usage of the second half of the 16c (1550–1600). The shift is in both directions, but the vast majority of the time to greater archaism. I mentioned two to less archaism, and another one is wroth|angry. Surprisingly, there is more wroth in the first part of the dictation. It is a statistically significant shift using 3 Nephi 5|6 as a shift point, not 3 Nephi 7|8. That is because angry predominates in both sections, going from two-thirds in the first part, to more than 90% in the second part of the dictation. So it is a minor shift to less archaism.

No, that is not right. That is one problem with the terms tight and loose. The original terms are tight control and loose control, and then they are misused or misconstrued to mean tight translation and loose translation, which is what you apparently did at some point, so it created a straw man in your mind. We ought to clarify for everyone that Wright only did a partial analysis of the biblical material in the Book of Mormon, and he probably did not use a comparison text that was very close to what Joseph Smith dictated. He needs to redo his analysis for the sake of rigor and veracity. It might be helpful to specify a few things about what the open-Bible theory actually believes. First, at Mosiah 12:21, Joseph Smith opened a King James Bible to Isaiah 52:7 and began to read that off to Oliver Cowdery. He read four verses word for word. Then 10 verses later, he went to Exodus 20 and began to read from verse 2. He inexplicably did not change italicized "any thing" in v.4 (the theory has Joseph Smith being heavily influenced by italicized words – here he ignored the first two he came across [there's one in v.2, am ]). But he unnecessarily changed "that is in heaven" to "in the heaven", and he changed "or that is" to "or things which is", not changing the italicized "is" and unnecessarily changing "that" to "things which". And so forth. In fact, there are many changes that were unnecessary and that went against Joseph Smith's personal preferences and that have to be stipulated. For instance, in one place the King James text reads "will", which Joseph Smith preferred over "shall", like others of his time, yet he unnecessarily changed the biblical "will" to "shall". There are other times the King James text reads "that", which Joseph Smith preferred over "which" to refer to persons, like others of his time, yet he unnecessarily changed the biblical "that" to "which". There are also quite a few complex changes that would have taken advance preparation. And many know about the the Coverdale|Septuagint reading at 2n1216 that has to be stipulated.

All of the biblical material needs to be analyzed, which one can find in a 2019 critical text book. It has a collation of all 36 biblical quotations sections, with more than 700 differences marked. Eleven biblical books are quoted in the Book of Mormon, and with so many differences, many/most of the changes would have had to be marked up in a King James Bible. The preparation would have taken a considerable amount of time. There is no eyewitness of the dictation who said he used a Bible, not even Michael Morse. Plus, there isn't clear evidence in the MSS of where biblical quotations begin and end. Anyone can check transitions and see some that are unmarked, unpunctuated, just like everything else.

Joseph Smith was the only one who dictated the text. If he worded the text, then he had to shift the English usage in about 30 ways. After dictating Mosiah, Alma, and Helaman, he had dictated 54% of the nonbiblical words (about 136,700), establishing various discernible usage patterns with large numbers of examples. One such pattern consists of the subordinating conjunctions after, before, because, for, and since. For more than half the nonbiblical part of the dictation, Joseph Smith dictated archaic subordinate that at only a 2% rate, and then for the remaining portion of the dictation he dictated archaic subordinate that at a 54% rate. That means that while he was in Pennsylvania, he consciously decided to dictate more archaically, in at least 25 ways, although there are a few exceptions where he dictated less archaically and where he dictated rare archaism. Two of the less archaic exceptions are that he dictated half the previous per-word rate of yea after 3 Nephi 7, and one-fifth the rate of present-tense periphrastic do (e.g. "do stumble"), going from 10% periphrastic do to only 2%, approximately. One change to rare archaism was in the mixture of usage of the conjunctions except and save. It is just under two-thirds except before 3 Nephi, and it shifts to about five-sixths save. In the large subset of "except|save it be|were" usage (n=149), the shift was from 62% save to 100% save. (In Early Modern English, "except it be|were" was used at its highest rate, and at 1,000 times the rate of "save it be|were"; the low rate of "save it be|were" (nine or ten instances) is why I call the latter rare archaism.) Up to Helaman 10, which is about half the dictation (nonbiblical), the usage split was 5/8 "save it be|were" and 3/8 "except it be|were" (n=63). After that, it was 100% "save it be|were". This also suggests conscious control. So, Joseph Smith must have consciously decided to begin to use "after that S", starting at 3 Nephi 12 (only one of 25 pseudo-archaic authors checked used any "after that S" at all — one item of evidence, supported by others, that not all obvious biblical archaisms were automatically imitated by pseudo-archaic authors). He consciously decided to use whoso almost all the time instead of whosoever almost all the time, starting in 3 Nephi 9; to use wherefore instead of therefore the vast majority of the time, starting in Ether; to use "before that S" some of the time, starting at 3 Nephi 28; to use mine and thine at a higher rate before words beginning in vowels; to use much more "they|them which" instead of "those which" in referring to persons; and so forth. It seems reasonable to me to reject that he was able to control 30+ linguistic features in this way. So it seems reasonable to me that they were part of an English-language translation that was delivered to him (2n2724).

Here's something I (S Carmack) wrote up a few months ago about another interesting aspect of Book of Mormon English usage (bear in mind that Joseph Smith's 1829 dictation of the Book of Mormon went from Mosiah to Moroni and then 1 Nephi to Words of Mormon): In addition to many other linguistic elements, the conjunction save usage of the Book of Mormon points away from 19c authorship. The text shifts after the book of Helaman to mostly conjunction save usage relative to synonymous except usage (shifting from 35% save [conj.] to 83%; n=300). (To verify this, exclude verbal save, prepositional uses, and biblical quotations.) This is not a shift to more archaic usage, as most of the shifts are. Furthermore, archaic "except it be|were" usage ends at Helaman 8:21 (24× to that point; "except it were" 15×, a few 17c texts noted with 13 or 14) and from then on it is "save it be|were" 86 times in a row. No text has more than five of "save it <be>"; the Book of Mormon has 130. I currently see 30+ different shifts in English usage, some subtle. One of the most interesting shifts, besides the ones Metcalfe pointed out and the shift from zero "after that S" (in 60% of the text) to 115 (in 40% of the text), is from 25% “they | them which” (vs. less archaic “those which”) to 92%, using 3 Nephi 7|8 as a boundary [orig. ch. 3 Nephi III | IV; n=235, Yates χ²≐103.82, p<.0001]. In general, the text shifts to somewhat more archaic usage (which is why there's a shift to wherefore and whoso), with a few exceptions. Frequent readers of the text have probably sensed the greater English archaism of the small plates and 3 Nephi to Moroni, especially if the first edition or critical text is read. [1] Brent Lee Metcalfe, “The Priority of Mosiah: A Prelude to Book of Mormon Exegesis,” in New Approaches to the Book of Mormon: Explorations in Critical Methodology, ed. Brent Lee Metcalfe (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1993), 409–15. https://archive.org/details/NewApproachesToTheBookOfMormon. [2] Arthur Glen Foster, Jr., “The Plates of Jacob: An Analysis of the Replacement to the Lost Manuscript of the Book of Mormon” (1983). See Metcalfe, “The Priority of Mosiah,” 408–09. [3] 3 Nephi 9:14 (whosoever) → 3 Nephi 9:20 (whoso). [4] Royal Skousen, Grammatical Variation (Provo, UT: FARMS and BYU Studies, 2016), 1019–21.