Isaiah 49:20 (King James Bible)
the children which thou shalt have after thou hast lost the other shall say again in thine ears the place is too strait for me
Oliver Cowdery initially omitted the verb say when he wrote down “shall again in thine ears” in 𝓞. At some later time, he recognized that the main verb was missing and inserted say in heavier ink in 𝓞, perhaps after first writing it in 𝓟. In other words, the correction in 𝓞 could have been made while he was copying from 𝓞 to 𝓟. In any event, he placed the say right before the quote; in fact, the choice of the verb say may have been a reasonable guess on his part. But the corresponding King James passage has say right after the helping verb, shall. Comparing 1 Nephi 20–21 with Isaiah 48–49, we find no other cases of variation in word order except for the occasional switching of two immediately adjacent words. The uniqueness of the switch here, plus the fact that it is in heavier ink, suggests that Oliver’s correction was his own and that he put say in the wrong place. In this long quotation from Isaiah 48–49, Oliver Cowdery made a number of non-immediate changes with heavier ink flow in the original manuscript. Note, in particular, the correction of claved to clave in 1 Nephi 20:21 and of ends to end in 1 Nephi 21:6; these two corrections in heavy ink were apparently done after 𝓟 had been copied from 𝓞.
Another possible word order for 1 Nephi 21:20 is “shall again say in thine ears”. Elsewhere the text does permit a short adverb like also to separate shall and say:
When the adverb is longer, shall and say are kept together, as in the following instance where the adverb is the prepositional phrase “at that day”:
However, these are the only examples involving shall and say, so we cannot deduce too much from this meager evidence regarding the word order in 1 Nephi 21:20.
In any case, the placement in 1 Nephi 21:20 of the main verb say after both again and in thine ears definitely sounds awkward. The differences between the King James text and the corresponding Book of Mormon quotes virtually always make the text easier to read. But moving say to the end of the clause clearly creates a more difficult reading in 1 Nephi 21:20. The most reasonable assumption here is that Oliver Cowdery’s placement of say is an error and that the original Book of Mormon text followed the word order of the King James Bible (namely, “shall say again in thine ears”).
Summary: Place say after the helping verb shall in 1 Nephi 21:20, with the result that the Book of Mormon text follows the King James text of Isaiah; Oliver Cowdery initially omitted the main verb say in 𝓞 when he first took down Joseph Smith’s dictation; Oliver later added the say in the wrong place.