The printer’s manuscript here reads brake, the archaic Early Modern English past-tense form for the verb break; the modern simple past-tense form, of course, is broke. The 1830 compositor set the word with the present-tense spelling break. The 1858 Wright edition restored the correct brake, which has been retained in the RLDS text. The 1888 LDS large-print edition also set the word as brake, but this edition was never used as a copytext for any subsequent LDS edition. On the other hand, the 1906 LDS large-print edition replaced break with the modern English broke; this change was followed in the third printing of the 1905 LDS missionary edition and has been maintained in all subsequent LDS editions. Elsewhere the text has shown a strong tendency to replace brake with broke:
In the last example, it appears that 𝓞 originally read as either brake or break, but not broke (for this part of the text, both 𝓟 and the 1830 edition are firsthand copies of 𝓞). Clearly, for 3 Nephi 20:3 the original text itself must have read brake, even if the scribe for 𝓞 (probably Oliver Cowdery) wrote it as break. We find the same problem earlier in 3 Nephi:
Here the 1830 compositor set berak, which appears to be a typo for break rather than brake (the misspelling berak results from the simple metathesis of re in break). Similarly, in 3 Nephi 20:3, the 1830 edition incorrectly reads break. And in both 3 Nephi 18:3 and 3 Nephi 20:3, the 1908 RLDS edition, following 𝓟, has break, which is clearly wrong for these two past-tense passages. Here in Alma 14:26, we have explicit evidence that the 1830 compositor sometimes set brake as break:
In summary, brake was sometimes changed to broke early on in the transmission of the text (in Alma 44:12, Alma 57:33, and 3 Nephi 20:3); and sometimes the 1830 compositor misspelled brake as break (in Alma 14:26 at least, and perhaps also in 3 Nephi 18:3 and 3 Nephi 20:3).
In three other instances, all the extant textual sources (including the printer’s manuscript) consistently read broke; but in each of these cases, the original manuscript is not sufficiently extant to determine whether it actually read brake or broke, although in the transcript of 𝓞 (see volume 1 of the critical text) I assumed that it consistently read brake:
Since Alma 57:33 shows Oliver Cowdery replacing brake with broke in 𝓟, it is possible that Oliver is responsible for these three other instances of broke in 𝓟.
In the King James Bible, the simple past-tense form broke does not occur at all, although of course the past participle broken is there. The only simple past-tense form for break in the King James text is brake (including a few of brakest). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the simple-past tense form broke dates from at least the early part of the 16th century. Since broke is theoretically possible, the critical text of the Book of Mormon will in each case follow the earliest textual sources in determining whether the text should read brake or broke. This gives us the following results:
But since the textual tendency has been to replace brake with broke, the three instances of broke may be errors for brake.
A similar decision was made with respect to whether the past-tense form for bear should be bare or bore (see under 1 Nephi 11:7) or whether the past-tense form for swear should be sware or swore (see under Enos 1:14). The textual tendency has been to replace bare with bore and sware with swore. For general discussion, see under past tense in volume 3.
We should also note here that Oliver Cowdery frequently misspelled break as brake in the manuscripts:
More often, Oliver spelled break correctly (in at least one of the manuscripts for 17 other passages). Scribe 2 of 𝓟 always spelled break correctly (6 times).
Summary: Based on the earliest textual sources, restore brake in Alma 14:26, Alma 44:12, and Alma 57:33; on the same basis, brake should be maintained in 3 Nephi 18:3 and 3 Nephi 20:3 while broke should be maintained in Alma 60:16, Ether 6:6, and Ether 7:18 (although these three instances of broke may have read brake in the original text).