John Dyneley Prince

“ 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. ”

“ SUMER and SUMERIAN. The Babylonian name Shumer was used in the cuneiform inscriptions together with Akkad, viz. mat Shumeri u Akkadī, “land of S. and A.,” to denote Babylonia in general (See Akkad) . In the non-Semitic ideographic documents the equivalent for Shumer is Kēngi, which seems to be a combination of kēn, “land” + gi, “reed,” i.e. “land of reeds,” and appropriate designation for Babylonia, which is essentially a district of reedy marshes formed by the Tigris and Euphrates. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”