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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.