In English the now separate words travail and travel descend from the same Old French word (with the meaning ‘to toil, work hard, labor’). Later the meaning in French generalized to mean ‘to work’. Borrowed from Old French into Middle English, the word also developed a separate meaning in English, namely, ‘to journey’ (since journeying in those times always involved considerable toil). Two separate pronunciations developed, one with stress on the first syllable /trævßl/ and the other with stress on the final syllable /trßveil/, based on the French spelling. And over time, in standard American English, separate meanings have been associated with the spellings. Thus the noun travel /trævel/ refers to journeying, while the noun travail /trßveil/ refers to ‘trouble, suffering’. But such a clear-cut distinction has never been followed historically and dialectally in English. For instance, the Oxford English Dictionary—from which this information comes (see under the verb travail )—lists /trævßl/ as the first pronunciation for travail. Standard American English makes a clear distinction, but such a distinction did not exist for many (perhaps most) speakers during the early 1800s in America.
The noun travail ‘labor, toil, suffering’, in contrast to travel ‘journey ’, occurs as many as six times in the Book of Mormon text. And in each case, the scribe wrote travel:
Three different scribes are responsible for the spelling travel: Oliver Cowdery, Hyrum Smith, and the unknown scribe 2 in 𝓟. And probably Joseph Smith himself pronounced the word as /trævßl/. For four of these cases, the context clearly indicates that the word is travail. Two refer to the “travail(s) of one’s soul”: Mosiah 14:11 and Mosiah 29:33, with the first one quoting Isaiah 53:11 from the King James Bible (“he shall see of the travail of his soul”). In Mosiah 27:33, we have much travail conjoined with long-suffering; further, one exhorts others “with much travail” (rather than “with much travel”) to keep the commandments of God. And in 3 Nephi 22:1, Isaiah 54:1 from the King James Bible is being quoted, and the word here is travail, not travel. The 1830 compositor, John Gilbert, easily recognized that the intended word in these four cases was travail, and thus he spelled each of these as travail. In fact, considerably later in his life, in a letter to James Cobb (written on 10 February 1879), Gilbert explained that he was surprised to discover that Oliver Cowdery, when proofing copy, pronounced travail the same as travel (that is, as /trævßl/):
In one instance he [Oliver Cowdery] was looking over the manuscript, when the word “travail” occurred twice in the form, but spelled in the manuscript, travel. Mr. Grandin when reading the proof pronounced the word correctly, but Cowdery did not seem to know the difference.
Gilbert here refers to two occurrences of travail in the same form (that is, in the same gathering of 16 pages) in the 1830 edition. He must therefore be referring to the two instances near the end of Mosiah since these are the only two that occur in the same 1830 gathering:
gathering
8
placement page 115, line 26
Mosiah 14:11
12
page 186, line 14
Mosiah 27:33
14
page 214, line 37
Mosiah 29:33
14
page 219, line 43
Alma 18:37
18
page 276, line 3
32
page 501, line 30
(I wish to thank Larry Porter for providing me a photocopy of Gilbert’s letter to Cobb. A typescript of part of the letter appears on pages 88–89 of Porter’s 1971 BYU doctoral dissertation, A Study of the Origins of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the States of New York and Pennsylvania, 1816–1831.)
For two occurrences of travel, John Gilbert did not interpret the word as travail. The reason for this is that in these two cases it is possible to interpret the word as referring to journeying rather than toiling or suffering. In 2 Nephi 29:4, the end of the passage refers to the Jews “bringing forth salvation unto the Gentiles”, which involved traveling throughout the Roman Empire (by Paul as well as by Peter and the other apostles). Similarly, Alma 18:37 refers to journeying—in this case, the journeyings of Lehi and his party in the wilderness of Arabia. Only in the 1981 LDS edition have these two occurrences of travel been reinterpreted as travail. These changes apparently derive from the analysis of Stan Larson, who first suggested that these two additional cases of travel should be considered as instances of travail. See pages 230–231 of his 1974 BYU master’s thesis, A Study of Some Textual Variations in the Book of Mormon Comparing the Original and the Printer’s Manuscripts and the 1830, the 1837, and the 1840 Editions; also see page 566 of his article “Conjectural Emendation and the Text of the Book of Mormon”, Brigham Young University Studies 18 (1978): 563–569.
Even though these two passages deal with journeying, the actual word travel /travail is conjoined with nouns that are semantically related to travail. In the case of 2 Nephi 29:4, three plural noun phrases are conjoined (“the travails and the labors and the pains of the Jews”). Each conjunct begins with the definite article the and is conjoined to the following conjunct by the conjunction and. Elsewhere in the text, we consistently find that for conjunctive structures of this form (namely, “the X and the Y and the Z”), the nouns X, Y, and Z always belong to the same semantic class, as in the following examples involving three or more conjoined nouns:
All of these examples suggest that in 2 Nephi 29:4 the word travails would work better than travels (“the travails and the labors and the pains of the Jews”). Nonetheless, travels is not impossible here, but since we have to choose, the more reasonable interpretation is travails.
In Alma 18:37, the passage begins by specifically mentioning “all the journeyings of their fathers in the wilderness”; then the following text lists “and all their sufferings with hunger and thirst and their travail etc.” If travel were selected here, then we would wonder why the redundant reference to both journeyings and travel within the same clause. In fact, the use of etc. at the end argues that travail is just one more in the list of the sufferings of Lehi’s people in the wilderness. Consider the strikingly similar passage that first refers to the journeyings of the sons of Mosiah into the land of Nephi and then follows with a list of their sufferings:
Thus Alma 18:37 parallels the nearby Alma 17:5, providing travel is reinterpreted as travail:
In this parallel, travail in Alma 18:37 corresponds to the word labor in Alma 17:5.
Thus internal evidence supports the 1981 reinterpretation of these two cases of travel in 2 Nephi 29:4 and Alma 18:37 as travail. The critical text will therefore accept these two emendations, as well as the four others that the 1830 compositor made (Mosiah 14:11, Mosiah 27:33, Mosiah 29:33, and 3 Nephi 22:1).
All other occurrences of travel in the manuscripts clearly refer to journeying (31 times), although it is interesting to note that in two cases Oliver Cowdery spelled the correct travel as travail. Both of these refer to the travels of Lehi’s people in the wilderness of Arabia:
These two occurrences of travail are found in the printer’s manuscript and occur after the two occurrences of travail (near the end of Mosiah) that John Gilbert referred to in his 1879 letter to James Cobb. (All other occurrences of travel and travail are spelled indistinguishably as travel by the scribes, including Oliver’s original spelling of travel in the original manuscript for these two instances in Alma 37.) It is possible that Gilbert mentioned the pronunciation difference between travel and travail to Oliver as they were proofing the 14th gathering (although he does not specifically mention this in his letter to Cobb). It would seem that all Oliver learned from this discussion (if it did occur) was that /trævßl/ could be also spelled as travail. In his copying from 𝓞 into 𝓟 for Alma 37, Oliver continued to remain oblivious to any differentiation between the spellings travel and travail on the basis of meaning.
Summary: Accept in 2 Nephi 29:4 and Alma 18:37 the emended spelling travail that was introduced in the 1981 LDS edition; also accept the emended spelling travail for the four cases that the 1830 compositor introduced in Mosiah 14:11, Mosiah 27:33, Mosiah 29:33, and 3 Nephi 22:1.