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The following comes from the blog Scriptural Mormonism. To read the full article, click here.
The following is an article I just encountered:
Sharon Black and Brad Wilcox, “188 Unexplainable Names: Book of Mormon Names No Fiction Writer Would Choose,” inReligious Educator 12, no. 2 (2011): 119–133.
The following is the conclusion of this very interesting article:
The 337 names included by Joseph Smith in the Book of Mormon (188 of which had never been heard or written before) seem to violate all the rules for choosing fictional names:
1. Joseph did not make conscious and deliberate choices. He dictated his manuscript to scribes without even pausing when he introduced extremely complex names.
2. Joseph did not choose names that would be easily accessible to readers. On the contrary, the names are almost all quite long and complex; his scribes reported that he could not pronounce most of them himself but had to spell them. Many of them are quite similar and easily confused: sounds are repeated with very little variation in surrounding sounds, and some names seem to be close variants of others.
3. Joseph did not choose names to fit characters. Some names are given to both heroes and villains, and no real correspondence has been noted between sound and personality.
To read the full article, click here.