Mistake in finale episode

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Leshy

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Just saw the finale episode yesterday again on TV and noticed a rather obvious mistake that slipped by me last time I saw it.

In the Magic Shop, when Anya tries to read a book containing cuneiform text, she thinks it's Sumerian. And she comments that the only thing she has been able to decipher is 'the', or 'towards'. Jonathan states that it's Babylonian - the text is similar, but the dialogue is entirely different.

As there isn't really a good shot of the book, it's hard to tell whether Jonathan is right, but from what I've seen, it indeed did look more like Babylonian than Sumerian. The fact that the text is similar seems somewhat odd - Sumerian had over 1200 different pictographs at some point, whereas Old Babylonian as used in the Codex Hammurabi has 86 standard signs - with the notable exceptions. Added to that that they are two entirely different languages (Babylonian is a semitic language, Sumerian is not), it's very doubtful Jonathan could have seen the difference from over where he was sitting.

At any rate, what definitely is wrong is Anya's comment. That she has found either 'the' or 'towards' is impossible. Much like Latin, Babylonian does not use articles, such as the word 'the'. And 'towards' in Babylonian is not a word in itself either, it is expressed by use of a ventive, the suffix -am to a verb. The suffix in nearly all cases assimilates with other suffixes to the word, making it hard to recognize, unless you've translated the entire verb.

Just something I happened to notice 😛
 
I'm sorry to inform you, that I don't speak Babylonian, so I don't know wether it's true ... how do you know all this stuff anyway!?!

I think the writers didn't anticipate on people like you 😉
 
Hehe. Well, I study Ancient History, and am specializing in the Ancient Near East - Mesopotamia etc.

Part of that is learning and/or studying the languages used during that time - such as Babylonian, Assyrian, Sumerian, Persian etc. It just so happened that in this episode I knew what they were talking about 😛

Pretty much the first chance to bring my study into practice 😉
 
Willow could probably "cheat" by using magic to translate.

But I think I read or heard and interview with one of the main players behind the scenes (Marti Noxon, maybe? Anyone else familiar with it?) who basically admits that a lot of the time they go for appearance rather than historical or mythical accuracy with their more arcane props and monsters.

(I noticed this myself in S2, when Drusilla is always looking at a deck of cards done in the style of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck, but definitely were not Tarot cards. Also in S4 when Willow, Giles, and Xander were doing the joining spell with Buffy, they were using a mix of Rider-Waite cards and more "pseudo-Tarot" cards. All the "fakes" were beautifully done, I have say.)
 
As someone who often pretends to know what they are talking about, I will concur with Leshy.
 
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