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After stressing the antiquity of the Egyptian language which must have been developed a very long time before the first hieroglyphic inscriptions, Abel goes on (1884, 4):

‘Now in the Egyptian language, this sole relic of a primitive world, there are a fair number of words with two meanings, one of which is the exact opposite of the other. Let us suppose, if such an obvious piece of nonsense can be imagined, that in German the word "strong" meant both "strong" and "weak"; that in Berlin the noun "light" was used to mean both "light" and "darkness"; that one Munich citizen called beer "beer", while another used the same word to speak of water: this is what the astonishing practice amounts to which the ancient Egyptians regularly followed in their language. How could anyone be blamed for shaking his head in disbelief? . . .’ (Examples omitted.)

(Ibid., 7): ‘In view of these and many similar cases of antithetical meaning (see the Appendix) it is beyond doubt that in one language at least there was a large number of words that denoted at once a thing and its opposite. However astonishing it may be, we are faced with the fact and have to reckon with it.’

The author goes on to reject an explanation of these circumstances which suggests that two words might happen by chance to have the same sound, and is equally firm in repudiating an attempt to refer it to the low stage of mental development in Egypt:

(Ibid., 9): ‘But Egypt was anything but a home of nonsense. On the contrary, it was one of the cradles of the development of human reason. . . . It recognized a pure and dignified morality and formulated a great part of the Ten Commandments at a time when the peoples in whose hands civilization rests to-day were in the habit of slaughtering human victims as a sacrifice to bloodthirsty idols. A people that kindled the torch of justice and culture in so dark an age cannot surely have been completely stupid in everyday speech and thought. . . . Men who were able to make glass and raise and move huge blocks by machinery must at least have possessed sufficient sense not to regard a thing as being simultaneously both itself and its opposite. How are we then to reconcile this with the fact that the Egyptians allowed themselves such a strangely contradictory language? . . . that they used to give one and the same phonetic vehicle to the most mutually inimical thoughts, and used to bind together in a kind of indissoluble union things that were in the strongest opposition to each other?’