John Dyneley Prince

“ That the possibilities of Russo-American trade are enormous, may be seen from the fact that Russia is already calling to us in this country to take the place of her natural ante-bellum market — Germany, whose indefatigable agents have already broken the ground for us. Before the outbreak of hostilities, the Russo-German trade amounted to the immense sum of £60,000,000 annually, and this is only the beginning of future demands from Russia for foreign goods. ”

“ This etymological study of Sumerian is attended with incalculable difficulties, because nearly all the Sumerian texts which we possess are written in an idiom which is quite evidently under the influence of Semitic. With the exception of some very ancient texts, the Sumerian literature, consisting largely of religious material such as hymns and incantations, shows a number of Semitic loanwords and grammatical Semitisms, and in many cases, although not always, is quite patently a translation of Semitic ideas by Semitic priests into the formal religious Sumerian language. ”

“ At the end of two semesters of such work, it has been found that the students who apply themselves to this rather exigent method are well able not only to converse on simple topics, but also to read a newspaper in Russian and to enjoy the easier forms of Russian literature.
With a force of men trained in this way to an independent use of the Russian vernacular, the United States would be in a position, both during and after the War, to avoid all foreign agents and middlemen in mutual trade, and thus to establish an American sytem of credit with Russia. ”

“ The Russian Minister of Commerce and Industry and the Russian Chamber of Export are inviting Americans to engage in mutual trade. In other words, Russia has opened her arms to us commercially, and, if we do not take advantage of this opportunity we may be sure that other countries will get the start of us in this new and rich field of activity. ”

“ Such phonetic and dialectic changes, so different from any of the Semitic linguistic phenomena, are all the more valuable because they are set before us only by means of Semitic equivalents. Certainly no cryptography based exclusively on Semitic could exhibit this sort of interchange.
It should be added here in passing that the geographical or tribal significance of these two Sumerian dialects has never been established. There can be no doubt that Eme-sal means “woman’s language,” and it was perhaps thus designated because it was a softer idiom phonetically than the other dialect. ”

“ The kingdom of Assyria, which was the outgrowth of the primitive settlement on the site of the city of Assur, was developed by a probably gradual process of colonization in the rich vales of the middle Tigris region, a district watered by the Tigris itself and also by several tributary streams, the chief of which was the lower Zab. ”

“ It is not likely, as many scholars have thought, that Akkad was ever used geographically as a distinctive appellation for northern Babylonia, or that the name Sumer (q.v.) denoted the southern part of the land, because kings who ruled only over Southern Babylonia used the double title “king of Sumer and Akkad,” which was also employed by northern rulers who never established their sway farther south than Nippur, notably the great Assyrian conqueror Tiglath-pileser III. (745–727 B.C.) . ”

“ Sumerian has a system of vowel harmony strikingly like that seen in all modern agglutinative languages, and it has also vocalic dissimulation similar to that found in modern Finnish and Esthonian. Vocalic harmony is the internal bringing together of vowels of the same class for the sake of greater euphony, while vocalic dissimulation is the deliberate insertion of another class of vowels, in order to prevent the disagreeable monotony arising from too prolonged a vowel harmony. ”

“ The present War has placed the United States on a most enviable commercial footing, and this is especially true in connection with the possible future trade relations with the great Russian Empire. Far-seeing business men all over the country have already begun to realize this fact with respect to Russia and are, therefore, encouraging young men to take up the study of the Russian language. ”

“ Sumerian is quite devoid of grammatical gender. Semitic, on the other hand, has grammatical gender as one of its basic principles.
6. Furthermore, in a real cryptography or secret language, of which English has several, we find only phenomena based on the language from which the artificial idiom is derived. Thus, in the English “Backslang,” which is nothing more than ordinary English deliberately inverted, in the similar Arabic jargon used among school children in Syria and in the Spanish thieves' dialect, the principles of inversion and substitution play the chief part. ”

“ Russian is not like some other languages. It is impossible to learn to speak and write in it intelligibly without a thorough comprehension of its very complicated grammatical system. Aside from the fact that the noun declensions exhibit a difficult phonetic development with a generally logical system of case-endings running throughout and that the adjectival declensions must be learned as a development distinct from the nouns, the Russian verb presents the greatest difficulty to the non-Slavonic speaking student. ”

“ In Daniel, the term “Chaldaeans” is very commonly employed with the meaning “astrologers, astronomers,” which sense also appears in the classical authors, notably in Herodotus, Strabo and Diodorus. In Daniel i. 4, by the expression “tongue of the Chaldaeans,” the writer evidently meant the language in which the celebrated Babylonian works on astrology and divination were composed. It is now known that the literary idiom of the Babylonian wise men was the non-Semitic Sumerian ”

“ These invaders, according to this latter view, adopted the religion and culture of the conquered Sumerians; and, consequently, the Sumerian idiom at a comparatively early date began to be used exclusively in the Semitic temples as the written vehicles of religious thought in much the same way as was the medieval Latin of the Roman Church. The solution of this problem is of vital importance in connexion with the early history of man's development in the Babylonian region. ”

“ The element a means “water,” and in u-sar it is probable that u also means “water,” while sar is “park, district.” See Prince, Materials for a Sumerian Lexicon, s.v. usar. ↑ The name appears as Aš-šur (ki) and Aš-šu-ur (ki) . ”

“ The word “Chaldaean” is used in Daniel in two senses. It is applied as elsewhere in the Old Testament as a race-name to the Babylonians (Dan. iii. 8, v. 30, ix. 1) ; but the expression is used oftener, either as a name for some special class of magicians, or as a term for magicians in general (ix. 1) . ”

“ For example, Pekingese zhen, Hakka nyin, Fuchow nöng, Ningpo zhing and nying, Wonchow zang and nang all = “man.” This demonstrates beyond a doubt the possibility of a strongly palatalized n becoming a palatal sibilant or vice versa, between which utterances there is but a very slight tongue movement. ”