By and By

In 1978 my wife and I lived in Somerville, Massachusetts where many of the locals had never ventured far from their home north of the Charles. One day we had a classic conversation with a neighbor.
"Where are you from?"
"Utah."
"Where's that?"
"By California."
"Oh, you're from the West are you? I have relatives in the West, in Chicago. Maybe you know them."
From a New England perspective in contemporary America, Utah is "by" California, but is it also "by" Illinois? We analyzed all occurrences of the term "near" in a geographic context in the Book of Mormon and concluded two points within about 5 air kilometers of each other would have been considered "near" in Nephite parlance. See the article "Things Near and Far." We will now attempt to quantify what the Nephites meant when they said a person, place or thing was "by" something else. This will take some time. In the pdf version of the raw 1981 LDS text available for download here, Adobe Reader finds 1,189 instances of the word "by." 109 of those instances have a geographic or at least spatial context. Netting out duplicates, we have 88 passages with discrete referents that were "by" one another.

Image A of Spreadsheet Analyzing All Occurrences
of the Word "by" in a Spatial Context in the Text

Image B of Spreadsheet Analyzing All Occurrences
of the Word "by" in a Spatial Context in the Text

Image C of Spreadsheet Analyzing All Occurrences
of the Word "by" in a Spatial Context in the Text

An unexpected pattern shows up in this data. In all cases, where Nephite authors used the word that came to be translated "by" in a spatial context, there was a perimeter, an edge, a littoral or what the Book of Mormon calls "borders." The dividing line could be between land and sea Alma 50:9, land and river Alma 43:51, or land and some other body of water Alma 17:34. It could divide flatter lands from a hill Mormon 6:2 or settled territory from wilderness Alma 8:3. The entrance or gate that divided a city from its environs Alma 49:18 was a place the term was used, as was the line separating private property from public commons Helaman 7:10. Two different groups of people in a standoff could be "by" each other Helaman 1:31 and a large land area was "by" its own borders Helaman 1:26. Sometimes the boundary was rectilinear Alma 50:13 although often it was curvilinear Alma 22:29 or circular Alma 47:14. The interface could even be multi-dimensional as when the Jaredite barges were submerged under the surface of the ocean Ether 6:7. A common theme in these passages is movement Mormon 5:5 or a path facilitating movement Alma 58:26.

Given the 100% positive correlation between the notion of a margin and the use of the word "by" in a spatial or geographic context in the text, it should not surprise us that estimated relative distances are modest. The referents in 49 of the 88 instances analyzed (55%) were probably within 200 meters of each other. The referents in 59 of the 88 instances analyzed (57%) were probably within 500 meters of each other. The referents in 78 of the 88 instances analyzed (88%) were probably within 5 air kilometers of each other. We estimate the maximum distance between entities "by" each other probably did not exceed 25 air kilometers.

The idea that any two entities the Nephites considered "by" each other were relatively proximate is supported when we look at some of the other prepositions the text uses in association with the term "borders" (the singular, "border," is not attested):

• near Alma 27:14
• in Mosiah 23:25
• within Mosiah 19:6
• into Alma 16:2
• upon Alma 62:32
• to Alma 51:28
• around Alma 16:3
• joining Alma 21:1
• round about Alma 28:1
• on Alma 51:26
• as far as 3 Nephi 4:13

So, in the Nephite worldview, Utah would not have been "by" California. Utah would have been by both Nevada and Arizona, both of which would have been by California. Provo would not have been "by" Salt Lake City; although Provo would have been by Utah Lake, Salt Lake City would have been by the Great Salt Lake, and Utah County would have been by Salt Lake County.