"Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" -- the prototype for William Wright style "words"?

I've been reading the Book of Daniel, and the story in Chapter 5, where Daniel interprets the writing on the wall, reminded me of William Wright's "words" and the methods he uses for interpreting them, as well as my own recent stab at such an interpretation in "Baggu ash-ni fire-dwell a gog ifluaren bansil este repose." Here is Daniel's analysis (vv. 25-28):

And this is the writing that was written: Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. This is the interpretation of the thing:

Mene: God hath numbered [menah] thy kingdom, and finished it.

Tekel: Thou art weighed [tekiletah] in the balances, and art found wanting.

Peres: Thy kingdom is divided [perisath], and given to the Medes and Persians [upharas].

My understanding is that the writing on the wall, unlike William Wright's multilingual hodgepodges, consists entirely of normal Aramaic words, which can be translated literally as "mina, mina, shekel, and half-pieces." A mina is either 50 or 60 shekels, and commentators are divided on whether the "half-pieces" are half-minas or half-shekels, but basically these are all units of weight which, like our English pound, were also used as units of currency. Note that pharsin is the plural of peres, and that u- is a prefix meaning "and."

It doesn't make any sense literally, though. The first three words might mean two minas and a shekel (i.e., either 101 or 121 shekels), but the final word is perplexing. "A shekel and a half" makes sense, but "a shekel and halves"?  I don't know anything about Aramaic, but I would be willing to bet that the word upharsin -- "and halves" -- is attested nowhere but in this story. "One and a half" is an understandable quantity; "one and halves" is not.

Daniel therefore turned, as William so often does, to etymology. Mene, tekel, and peres derive from verbs meaning respectively "to count," "to weigh," and "to divide," and it is on these underlying roots that he bases his interpretation. He also uses a non-etymological association -- something like a pun -- to give the final word a double meaning. In addition to its etymological meaning of "to divide," upharsin -- specifically that form of the word, the one with the bizarre meaning "and halves" -- happens to sound an awful lot like "and Persians." These two unrelated readings of upharas are synthesized to produce the final meaning: that the kingdom will be divided between the Medes and Persians.

Isn't that rather similar to the sorts of analyses to which William subjects his "words"? The only thing Daniel failed to do was to try reading the inscription as Elvish rather than Aramaic. Well, better late than never.

The closest Elvish word to mene is menel, "the heavens." Tekel suggests the root tek-, "to write," and tecil, "pen." U- is a prefix in Elvish as well as in Aramaic, and u-par-sin can be read as "bad/difficult to learn in this way." Doesn't that read pretty well as meta-commentary on the whole writing-on-the-wall incident? Daniel specifically said that the hand that wrote the words had been "sent from" the "Lord of heaven" (vv. 23-24). So our Elvish reading goes like this: When God sends a hand from heaven to write your doom on your palace wall, that's learning things the hard way!

As for peres, the other word that appears in Daniel's analysis, it's an Elvish root meaning "affect, trouble, disturb" -- a pretty apt description or Belshazzar's reaction when he saw the hand:

Then the king's countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another (v. 6).