The Author hopes that this treatise may be of use to many persons who possess only an elementary knowledge of Hebrew, as well as to more advanced students; hence the frequent references to Francis Browne's Hebrew Lexicon...

My object in this essay is to show that a dental dialect most certainly existed in the Old Aramaic, and that the papyri from Elephantine, so far from exhibiting the sibilant dialect as giving place to the dental, rather exhibit the dental dialect as affected by the sibilant in a mixed community, drawn from various quarters, such as the Jewish garrison at Elephantine. I shall also endeavour to show, that the difference in dialect is due to locality and contact, rather than to the age of the inscriptions and documents ; and in doing this I shall call attention to evidence deducible from the cognate languages of South Arabia and Abyssinia.

(From the preface)