There are 22 instances of the word desolate in the current text, of which six are extant in 𝓞. For three of the extant instances, Oliver Cowdery wrote a plural form desolates in 𝓞 instead of the expected desolate. Nor did Oliver correct any of these to desolate in 𝓞. But he consistently wrote all instances of desolate in 𝓟 without an s at the end (20 times), as did scribe 2 of 𝓟 (2 times). In other words, neither Oliver nor scribe 2 of 𝓟 ever wrote desolates in 𝓟.
The third place where we have desolates in 𝓞 is found in the next book:
The plural s of the original manuscript is weak, but it is not erased. For this portion of the text, the 1830 edition was set from 𝓞; in fact, the compositor’s pencil marks are found on the two fragments of 𝓞 from 3 Nephi 4:1–2. Significantly, the compositor’s period follows the final s of desolates. If the final s had been erased, we would expect the compositor’s period to cover the erased s, but instead the period follows the s. In other words, the 1830 compositor read the manuscript as desolates, not desolate, even though he recognized the singular as the correct form in standard English and set desolate in the 1830 edition.
The three other instances of desolate(s) that are extant in 𝓞 occur in biblical quotes from Isaiah 49 and read in the singular (just as in the King James Bible):
Of the 22 instances of desolate(s) in the text, half occur in King James quotes. Here I list the earliest extant reading for the 11 instances that occur in the nonbiblical parts of the text, with plural instances set in bold; in each instance, desolate occurs in predicative position:
In one of these examples, a plural desolates might actually work:
Here desolates could be thought of as meaning ‘desolate places’. In my transcript for 𝓞, I conjectured that 𝓞 read desolates here in this latter part of Helaman 3:6, just as it did earlier in the verse as well as even earlier in verse 5. Of course, 𝓟 has the singular desolate in all these cases. If such a conjecture were accepted, it could perhaps be capitalized (“it was called Desolates”), similar to how the standard text capitalizes Desolation in “the land (of) Desolation”.
One possible explanation for why 𝓞 reads desolates is that Oliver Cowdery on his own added the extra s to desolate. In support of this possibility, we can cite several instances where Oliver added an extra s to the adjective requisite, which ends in the same unstressed syllable, /ßt/. The word requisite occurs three times in Alma 41:2, and each time Oliver initially wrote requisites in 𝓞:
In each case, Oliver erased the plural s in 𝓞, but in the first case, when he copied the text from 𝓞 into 𝓟, he once more wrote requisites —and this time he did not remove the plural s. As argued under Alma 41:2–3, Oliver is probably the one responsible for adding an extra s to the adjective requisite. We could have the same phenomenon with the form desolates.
Here are some nouns ending in /t/, mostly names, where Oliver Cowdery is responsible for adding an unacceptable plural s:
A related explanation for the form desolates is that it reflects Joseph Smith’s mispronunciation of desolate rather than Oliver Cowdery’s, especially since Oliver (and scribe 2 of 𝓟) always wrote the singular desolate when they copied this word from 𝓞 into 𝓟. In other words, Joseph was actually dictating desolates even though it should have been desolate, and Oliver faithfully copied it down in 𝓞 as desolates (except perhaps when it was in a biblical quote). We have already seen one clear example where Joseph tended to mispronounce something—namely, his tendency to dictate “around about”, at least initially, which Oliver himself never wrote in 𝓟. But unlike the case of desolates, Oliver usually corrected “around about” to “round about” in 𝓞. For discussion of this case, see under 1 Nephi 8:13.
Elsewhere in the original text, we have a few examples of words ending in t that typically take a plural form in the Book of Mormon, in opposition to what modern English readers expect:
In each of these cases, the critical text will maintain the unusual plural forms (see the discussion under each passage listed above).
The Oxford English Dictionary allows for the possibility of using desolate as a count noun, with the meaning ‘a desolate place or person’ (see section C under the participial adjective desolate). Three examples are given showing count usage—and for one of these examples the plural desolates occurs (original accidentals retained but also transcribed):
Another early example of the plural desolates (again with accidentals retained) is found on Literature Online :
These examples of desolates are plural nouns, not adjectives. But as already pointed out, in the phrase “it was called Desolates” (in Helaman 3:6) this kind of plural could work. David Calabro (personal communication) also points out that the plural desolates could be treated as a kind of adverbial essive phrase with the meaning ‘as desolate places’ in two out of the three places where desolates is extant in 𝓞:
This interpretation does not work that well for the extant case of desolates in Helaman 3:6 (“and now no part of the land was desolates save it were for timber”), although there is an implied plural here in this negative expression. Calabro notes that for this one case desolates is followed by an s-initial word, save, which could have led Oliver Cowdery to mishear desolate as desolates, especially since he had just heard a correct desolates in the previous verse:
In other words, the plural desolates in 𝓞 would be rejected in one case but retained in the two cases where the context is plural.
Extending this analysis to the cases where 𝓞 is not extant (and excluding the 11 cases where the text quotes from the King James Bible and reads desolate), one could emend desolate (the reading in 𝓟) to desolates whenever the context is plural, again with the understanding that desolates means ‘as desolate places’:
In those remaining cases where the context is singular and 𝓞 is not extant, the singular desolate would be retained but with the meaning ‘as a desolate place’:
As already noted, in the last instance the plural desolates might work as a name, thus “it was called Desolates”.
Finally, one could argue that the three instances in 𝓞 of desolate rather than desolates in 1 Nephi 21 (quoting from Isaiah) shows that Oliver Cowdery (and perhaps also Joseph Smith) did not automatically add s to desolate when the original text was dictated. This would imply that at least two of the three instances of desolates in 𝓞 are fully intended (in Helaman 3:5 and 3 Nephi 4:1), that the only extant occurrence of desolates that is an error occurred when desolate was followed by the s-initial save (in Helaman 3:6). This interpretation would also explain why desolates was never emended to desolate in 𝓞 itself, unlike the three cases of requisites in Alma 41:2.
Thus we have an intriguing set of possible emendations for the word desolate(s), and it is difficult to decide whether to make all these emendations or to accept the systematic desolate (what we expect in modern English). Another solution, of course, would be to accept in each case the reading of the earliest extant source, which would give us a mixture of desolate and desolates. Because of the difficulty of this problem, the safest solution is probably to retain what we expect in modern English, namely, the singular desolate in all cases, but with the realization that in some cases the original text may have read desolates. The few cases of desolates in 𝓞 will be treated as the result of a tendency to add a plural s to an adjective ending in /ßt/.
Summary: Reject the plural reading desolates, the reading in 𝓞, for Helaman 3:5–6 and 3 Nephi 4:1; although there is some evidence that the plural desolates could be correct in some cases, the safest solution is to adopt the expected form desolate, the reading in 𝓟 and all the printed editions.