Nov.5] SOCIETYOK BIBLICAL ARCH.tOLOGY. [1889.
THE NEW ACCADIAN.By the Rev.C. J. Ball, M.A.,Oxon.,
CHAPLAINOKLINCOLN'SINN; PORMHRLY CENSORANDLECTURERIN
KING'SCOLLEGE,LONDON.Sometime ago I began to study Chinese,not so much witha
viewto mastering the literature of that remarkablelanguage,as for
purposesof philological comparison. I had not gone far before I
was struck by an apparent parallelismof sound betweena series of
termswithwhichI was already familiarin the Babylonian syllabaries,
anda Chinese seriesof similar import. TheAccadiantermswere
these:
A-A(or AI), " father."
A-A(or AI), " moon."
A "hand," "side."
A "son."
and the Chinese :
ye, " father " (Amoy id).
yueh," moon."
yu, "hand."
yu, "young."
Thesecoincidences appearedto me so curious, thatI thought
it might be worth whileto make furtherinvestigation in order to
determine,if possible, whethertheremightnot be something more
in them thanmereaccident. I could not help rememberingthat
in Accadian the moon is a goddess, andthe consort of the sun, just
as she is in Chinese, whereasin the Semitic languagesgenerally,the
termfor " moon " is of the masculine gender; so that a Babylonian
or an Assyrian uninfluenced by non-Semitic ideas, would have
naturally spoken of the moon-god. Then, again,the Turkish At,
" moon," waspresentto my mind, as also the Coptic loh (a de
scendantof the old Egyptian adh),and eventhe Greek lo, which
Pausaniastells us was a title of the moon-goddess at Argos. It
seemednoteworthythatall these namescontainedthe_y-sound,which
Assyrianscholarsconsiderto be either expressedor suppressed in
the sign ^ }] a-a or a-i.
4