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," in Religious 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. The Book of Mormon is set in times and cultures
with languages about which Joseph Smith knew nothing. He knew little about its
antecedent Hebrew and Egyptian languages or cultures at the time of
translation, although he did study them during later periods of his life.
4. Joseph did not use different resources. Local artifacts of
Joseph Smith’s lifetime and lifestyle had no connection to the civilization of
the Book of Mormon or its culture or languages. Ancient and foreign name lists
were not available.
5. Joseph did not choose names because of personal associations.
The only Book of Mormon names with any connection to Joseph Smith’s family or
associates are Joseph and Samuel—such common names in ancient Hebrew cultures
and so prominent in the Bible that claims of personal connections seem
unfounded.
Does Joseph Smith’s disregard for naming conventions indicate he
was a careless craftsman, or does it indicate he was a careful translator of a
record full of authentic names which were not his inventions? For Joseph Smith
to have invented the 188 unique names found in the Book of Mormon seems highly
unlikely. Coming up with that many names would have been
overwhelming—especially considering Joseph’s limited formal education. Even if
someone were to suggest that inventing that number of names in a severely
limited time frame might have been possible, their consistency with language
patterns yet to be discovered removes it far from the realm of probability.
If the Book of Mormon is a clever work of fiction, it is
reasonable to expect that Joseph Smith chose character names in the way that
clever fiction writers do. However, this study demonstrates that he did not.
