Isaiah 6:9 (King James Bible) and he said / go and tell this people hear ye indeed but understand not and see ye indeed but perceive not
In the Hebrew original, the verbs understand and perceive are second person plurals. The King James translation leaves the subject pronoun ye unstated for these two verbs. The King James text could have been translated more literally as “hear ye indeed but ye understand not / and see ye indeed but ye perceive not”. Instead of supplying ye, the Book of Mormon text adds the third person plural pronoun they. Thus we end up with a repeated shift from second person to third person. There is no doubt that the two occurrences of they are intentional and should be retained in the critical text.
The earliest Book of Mormon sources for this passage differ in the tense for one of the verbs. The original manuscript is not extant for this verse, but the printer’s manuscript has the past-tense form perceived rather than the present-tense perceive, the reading of the King James text. Yet the parallel understand is in the present-tense in both 𝓟 and the King James Bible. In addition, the Book of Mormon text has consistently maintained the present-tense hear and see of the King James Bible. Thus the earliest Book of Mormon text has a single disagreement in tense (“understand … perceived”). The 1830 edition maintained this disagreement, but the 1837 edition changed the text so that there is tense agreement with the second verb (“understood … perceived”) rather than with the first verb (“understand ... perceive”).
It appears that an extra d was added to the verb perceive at some point early in the transmission of the Book of Mormon text, probably when Joseph Smith dictated the text to his scribe (apparently Oliver Cowdery for this part of the text). The scribe seems to have misheard “they perceive not” as “they perceived not”. The /n/ of the following not makes it difficult in normal speech to hear whether the preceding word would have ended in /v/ or /vd/—that is, in continuous speech the cluster /vdn/ is typically pronounced without the d, so the scribe could have thought he heard /vdn/ when in fact Joseph had pronounced /vn/.
There is evidence elsewhere that Oliver Cowdery could misinterpret complex consonant clusters that are formed at the boundaries of words. In the following example, the consonant d was dropped from the consonant sequence of /zdd/ that occurred when supposed was immediately followed by that:
Internal evidence argues that the original text in Alma 56:37 read in the past tense—that is, as “supposed that” rather than the present-tense “suppose that” (the reading in 𝓞). For instance, all the other finite verbs in the larger passage (saw, did, and pursued ) are in the past tense. The 1830 typesetter realized there was an error in tense here, so he added the d to suppose (although he then dropped the following that which had facilitated the misinterpretation in the first place). For complete discussion, see Alma 56:37.
In another example, a consonant /z/ was added (similar to the adding of /d/ here in 2 Nephi 16:9). In this case, Joseph Smith undoubtedly dictated “my son see”, which Oliver Cowdery misinterpreted as “my sons see”, thus misconstruing /ns/ as /nzs/:
The context makes it very clear that Alma is speaking to only one son, Corianton. Thus Oliver, when he copied the text from 𝓞 into 𝓟, emended the plural sons to the singular son. See the discussion under Alma 41:14.
Here in 2 Nephi 16:9, we probably have one more example of the scribe mishearing Joseph Smith’s pronunciation of a sequence of consonants. The original text for this verse, just like the corresponding King James passage, had four present-tense verb forms: hear, understand, see, and perceive. The introduction of the past-tense perceived into the text (probably in 𝓞 itself ) then led to the 1837 editing of the preceding understand to understood, which further compounded the confusion in tenses. The 1906 LDS edition set the present-tense perceive (apparently the original reading for this verb), but this change was probably a typo since the preceding past-tense understood was maintained in that edition. The critical text will maintain the four original presenttense verb forms in 2 Nephi 16:9, in agreement with the verb forms in the corresponding King James version (Isaiah 6:9).
Summary: Replace in 2 Nephi 16:9 the two past-tense verb forms found in the current text (understood and perceived) with their present-tense forms (understand and perceive); the past-tense perceived is probably the result of Oliver Cowdery misinterpreting Joseph Smith’s dictation of “perceive not” as the phonetically similar “perceived not”.