The first analysis of Sumerian grammar was made by myself in 1870, when the general outlines of the language were fixed and the verbal forms read and explained.[34] Three years later Lenormant threw the materials I had collected into a connected and systematic form, one result of which was a controversy started by the Orientalist, Joseph Halévy, who maintained that Sumerian was not a language at all, but a cryptograph or secret writing. The answers made by the Assyriologists to this curious theory obliged its author constantly to shift his ground, but at the same time it also obliged them to examine their materials more carefully and to revise conclusions which had been arrived at on insufficient evidence. An important discovery was now made by Haupt, who had already given the first scientific translation of a Sumerian text;[35] he demonstrated the existence of two dialects, one of which is marked by all the phenomena of phonetic decay.[36] This was naturally supposed to indicate a difference of age in the two dialects, the one being the older and the other the later form of the language. Subsequent research, however, has gone to show that the two dialects were really used contemporaneously, the decayed state of that which was called “the woman’s language” by the Babylonians being due to the fact that it was spoken in Akkad or Northern Babylonia, where the Semitic element became predominant at a much earlier period than in Sumer or Southern Babylonia. Up to this time the study of Sumerian had been almost entirely confined to the bilingual texts, of which a very large number existed in the library of Nineveh, and in which a Semitic translation was attached to the Sumerian original. Now, however, the French excavations at Tello in Southern Babylonia began to furnish European scholars with monuments of the pre-Semitic period, and to these the decipherers, among whom Amiaud and Thureau Dangin hold the first place, accordingly turned their attention. Texts composed in days when Sumerian princes still governed the country, and written by scribes who were unacquainted with a Semitic language, were successfully attacked with the assistance of the bilingual tablets of Nineveh. But it was soon found that between these genuine examples of Sumerian composition and the Sumerian which was written and explained by Semitic scribes there was a good deal of difference. The Semites had derived their culture from their Sumerian predecessors, and a considerable part of the religious and legal literature that had been handed on to them was in the older language. This older language long continued to be that of both religion and law, the two conservative forces in society, Sumerian becoming to the Semitic Babylonians what Latin was to mediæval Europe. The inevitable result followed: Semitic idioms and modes of thought were clothed in a Sumerian dress, and the ignorance of the scribe produced not infrequently the equivalent of the dog-Latin of a modern school-boy.