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Since language serves not only to express one’s own thoughts but essentially
to communicate them to others the question may be raised how it was that the
primal Egyptian’ made his neighbour understand ‘which side of the twin concept
he meant on any particular occasion’. In the written language this was done
with the help of the so-called ‘determinative’ signs which, placed after the
alphabetical ones, assign their meaning to them and are not themselves intended to
be spoken. (Ibid., 18): ‘If the Egyptian word "ken" is to mean "strong", its sound, which is written alphabetically, is followed
by the picture of an upright armed man; if the same word has to express
"weak", the letters which represent the sound are followed by the picture of a
squatting, limp figure. The majority of other words with two meanings are similarly
accompanied by explanatory pictures.’ Abel thinks that in speech the desired
meaning of the spoken word was indicated by gesture.
According to Abel it is in the ‘oldest roots’ that antithetical double
meanings are found to occur. In the subsequent course of the language’s development
this ambiguity disappeared and, in Ancient Egyptian at any rate, all the
intermediate stages can be followed, down to the unambiguousness of modern
vocabularies. ‘A word that originally bore two meanings separates in the later language
into two words with single meanings, in a process whereby each of the two
opposed meanings takes over a particular phonetic "reduction" (modification) of the
original root.’ Thus, for example, in hieroglyphics the word ‘ken’, ‘strong-weak’, already divides into ‘ken’, ‘strong’ and ‘kan’, ‘weak’. ‘In other words, the concepts which could only be arrived at by
means of an antithesis became in course of time sufficiently familiar to men’s
minds to make an independent existence possible for each of their two parts and
accordingly to enable a separate phonetic representative to be formed for each
part.