240 REV. W. ST. CLAIR TISDALL, D.D._, ON THE BOOK OF DANIEL : 



instances of the change in nouns, giving the reference to his 

 edition of three papyri, viz., t^nH?2 in line 24 ; and III, 

 line 3 ; also ]ni"r in I, line 28. In P. 13491, line 9, the later 

 form ini, gold, occurs for the earlier IHT, so too else- 

 where. 



Anyone acquainted with the Near East and the Semitic 

 words used in the dialects of modern Arabic and adopted into 

 modern Persian, Urdu, and Turkish, will find no difficulty in 

 understanding the change from Z into D in Aramaic. For 

 instance, in the modern Arabic vernacular dialects of Syria 

 and Palestine, while in one village the word for " male " is 

 pronounced Zeher, in another one hears the pronunciation 

 Deker, while the literary form of the word is Dhakar, which is 

 Btill recognised as the correct way of pronouncing it. Again, 

 the classical Arabic word Dhu, Dhi, is in some places pronounced 

 Dzu, Dzl, in others Zu, Zi. So the Classical Ha-dhihi (this,/.) 

 is commonly changed in the vernacular of Syria into Di, placed 

 after instead of before its noun. The Arabic letter Dh (3 : 

 in form a dotted D) represents the transition between the older 

 Z sound and the later D sound in Aramaic. Thus the earlier 

 Z was often doubtless pronounced Dhi, before it finally became 

 D. In the Semitic languages the change is quite an easy and 

 gradual one even to the present day. 



Here we should call attention to the degree in which the 

 grammar of the Aramaic (of both Biblical Aramaic and the 

 language of the Aramaic papyri) has been a:ffected by the in- 

 fluence of the Babylonian language ; or at least how the 

 Aramaic of the fifth century B.C., Biblical or otherwise, while 

 differing from later Aramaic, both Western and Eastern, agrees 

 in certain respects with the Babylonian language. Assyrio- 

 Babylonian tablets show that it was quite a usual thing to use 

 the masculine instead of the feminine form of a verb when 

 coupled with a feminine noun ; and also that the afiixed pronoun 

 often remained masculine, though referring to a preceding 

 feminine noun. A few examples will suffice to prove this fact, 

 which is well known to all Assyrian scholars. For instance, in 

 the Creation Tablets we read : " Tiamat annita ina shemisha 

 mahhutash iiemi, ushanni tensha " ; on her hearing this 

 Tiamat spoke (masc. form) distractedly, she (lit. he) changed her 

 mind. (Tablet IV, 87, 88.) So too : " Ipush-ma sapara shulma 

 qirbish Tiamat ; irbitti shari ushtisbita, ana la asie mimmesha : 

 shara shuta, shara ishtana, shara shadu, shara amurra " ; And he 



