The names' sign make-up does carry information: it rules out a Sumerian name pattern
Measured against lemmatized Early Dynastic Sumerian names, the archaic names' sign make-up is clearly distinct (element odds ratio 1.35 against 4.5–5.8), so their sign statistics do identify something about language, at least negatively, contrary to this answer's claim that they cannot.
What it means
- The names are informative about language at least by exclusion, so further benchmarks (Semitic, dependents-only) are worth running.For: Do the roughly 440 personal names in the archaic texts follow Sumerian, Semitic or some other naming pattern?
Next steps 12
Details
Go through the 27 matched archaic-to-ED names. Drop any that depend on a spelling first attested after ED I-II, such as the EN.E2 spelling of Enlil, and rerun the null comparison. If the excess over the null holds, continuity stands.
Details
Compare the full sign profiles of Schøyen/Brussels names and excavated Jemdet Nasr/Uruk names (shared vocabulary, Jensen-Shannon distance against a permutation null) to see whether they form two distinct naming populations.
Details
For each matched name, estimate the probability of a chance match from the frequency of its signs in ordinary entries and in Early Dynastic names, and rank the matches by strength.
Details
Repeat the bridge only for archaic names that contain a sign occurring in under 1% of names, weighting each match by how unlikely it is under the shuffle null. A surplus there would point to real survivals; none would leave the names with no route to a reading.
Sources 2
Cite it
Mysteries Department. (2026). The names' sign make-up does carry information: it rules out a Sumerian name pattern [Evidence EVD0DFVRBFA614X]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DFVRBFA614X
@misc{mysteriesdept_evd0dfvrbfa614x,
title = {The names' sign make-up does carry information: it rules out a Sumerian name pattern},
author = {{Mysteries Department}},
year = {2026},
note = {Evidence, catalog key EVD0DFVRBFA614X},
url = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DFVRBFA614X}
}