Alma 49:10 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
perhaps he would have caused the Lamanites to have [attackted 0|attacked 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] the Nephites at the city of Ammonihah

Here 𝓞 is extant for the last three letters of the past participial form attackted, which shows that the base form for the verb attack ended in a t (thus attackt +ed ). In 𝓟, on the other hand, Oliver Cowdery wrote the word as the standard attacked. When we consider all occurrences of the verb attack in the manuscripts, we discover that 𝓞 is sufficiently extant for 11 out of 15 cases, and in every one of those extant cases the word ends in a t, either as attackt (10 times) or as attact (once). When Oliver copied the text from 𝓞 into 𝓟, he wrote the word as attackt in 11 out of the 15 cases in 𝓟; in one of those cases, in Helaman 1:18, he initially wrote the word without the t but then inserted the final t inline (probably as an immediate correction since the inserted t is written without any change in the level of ink flow). But in four cases in 𝓟 (each marked below with an asterisk), Oliver wrote the verb without the t. Here is the complete list:

passage 𝓞 𝓟
Alma 43:24 —— * attack
Alma 49:10 attackted * attacked
Alma 49:11 —— attackt
Alma 49:17 attackt attackt
Alma 52:5 attackt attackt
Alma 52:16 attackt attackt
Alma 52:17 attackt attackt
Alma 53:5 attackt attackt
Alma 55:33 —— attackt
Alma 56:21 attackt attackt
Alma 56:22 attackt attackt
Alma 58:2 attackt * attack
Alma 59:5 attackted attackted
Helaman 1:18 attact attack > attackt
Helaman 1:26 —— * attack

The evidence in 𝓞 argues that Joseph Smith consistently pronounced the verb as /ßtækt/ rather than /ßtæk/. Oliver Cowdery seems to have always written it down that way in 𝓞, as attackt, except for one instance of attact (in Helaman 1:18). In 𝓟, on the other hand, Oliver occasionally changed attackt to attack (four times), which suggests that both were current in his speech. The critical text will assume that for Joseph the verb was attackt and will therefore interpret each instance as attackt, even in the two cases where 𝓞 is not extant and 𝓟 reads attack (namely, in the first and last occurrences in the text). Of course, the original text may have consistently read with the standard attack, in which case Joseph’s attackt would have been due to dialectal overlay.

The dialectal use of attackt for standard attack was very common during the 1800s, with the following examples (from Literature Online ) that are contemporary with the 1830 publication of the Book of Mormon:

But there is also evidence from Literature Online for the use of attackt in Early Modern English (accidentals here regularized except for the original spelling of attackt):

Summary: Accept attackt as the original form of the verb attack here in Alma 49:10 and throughout the Book of Mormon text; all the extant evidence in 𝓞 consistently supports this form rather than the standard attack.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 4

References