Alma 50:40 Textual Variants

The earliest occurrences of the name Pahoran are actually spelled Parhoron in the original manuscript, with an r before the h and an o for the last vowel. Joseph Smith probably pronounced this name with stress on the second syllable (just as we do today), but this pronunciation made it very difficult for Oliver Cowdery, the scribe here, to hear the r before the h. As a result, by the 5th occurrence (in Alma 51:5), Oliver started to spell the name as Pahoron in 𝓞. For the 7th and 8th occurrences (in Alma 51:7), Oliver appears to have once more spelled the name with the r before the h, but for these two occurrences he spelled the last vowel as a. He soon returned to the o spelling for the last vowel but now neglected once more the r before the h. All the remaining extant spellings (from Alma 62:44 through Helaman 1:13) are spelled in this way, as Pahoron.

In the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery first copied this name as Pahoran, which is what the standard text has today. However, beginning with Alma 61:9 (almost halfway through the occurrences of this name), Oliver started to spell the name as Pahoron, probably because this is how he had spelled the name in the original manuscript for this part of the text. This spelling, Pahoron, continues in the printer’s manuscript through the last occurrence of the name (in Helaman 2:3).

In the following list, I provide every extant instance in the manuscripts of the name Parhoron. In each case, I give the word as transcribed in volumes 1 and 2 of the critical text. The right-leaning slash (/) is not in the transcription per se but is used here to stand for the end of a manuscript line; for the other symbols, see the introductions to those two volumes:

For the first two occurrences of the name (here in Alma 50:40), the r before the h is not the normal r that Oliver Cowdery produced, although the very first occurrence does appear to be more like an r than, say, an s. Later, when Oliver made a mistake in writing the name Parhoron, his final version shows a very clear r in the correction (as in, for instance, the 4th and 7th occurrences listed above).

The evidence is very strong that the last vowel in the name is an o, not a. The final vowel is fully extant for 15 instances in 𝓞, and it reads o for 13 of those cases, including the first two instances of the name in the text (here in Alma 50:40). The evidence for the r before the h is not as consistent, but still the support for the r is stronger than the evidence for no r at all before the h.

One alternative explanation for the extra r in Parhoron is that Oliver Cowdery, instead of writing only the vowel a, wrote ar in anticipation of the or in the following syllable. However, there is no phonological anticipation of this kind in the spelling of similar names such as Cezoram and Cumorah; that is, they are never miswritten as Cerzoram or Curmorah (although, it should be pointed out, there are no extant occurrences of these two names in 𝓞, unlike the case of Parhoron).

There is no direct support for the sequence rh from other names in the Book of Mormon, but there is evidence for nh (in Giddianhi and Kumenonhi ) and mh (in Limhi, Limher, and Limhah). In other words, there is evidence that a syllable-final sonorant can be followed by a syllable-initial /h/. In addition, there is evidence for rsh (Jershon)—that is, a syllable-final /r/ followed by a syllable-initial voiceless fricative (namely, /sˇ/) that is phonetically similar to /h/.