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In his essay on ‘The Origin of Language’ Abel (1885, 305) calls attention to further traces of ancient difficulties in thinking. Even to-day the Englishman in order to express ‘ohne’ says ‘without’ (‘mitohne’ [‘with-without’] in German), and the East Prussian does the same. The word with’ itself, which to-day corresponds to the German ‘mit’, originally meant ‘without’ as well as ‘with’, as can be recognized from withdraw and ‘withhold’. The same transformation can be seen in the German ‘wider’ (‘against’) and ‘wieder’ (‘together with’).

For comparison with the dream-work there is another extremely strange characteristic of the ancient Egyptian language which is significant. ‘In Egyptian, words can - apparently, we will say to begin with - reverse their sound as well as their sense. Let us suppose that the German word "gut" ["good"] was Egyptian: it could then mean "bad" as well as "good", and be pronounced "tug" as well as "gut". Numerous examples of such reversals of sound, which are too frequent to be explained as chance occurrences, can be produced from the Aryan and Semitic languages as well. Confining ourselves in the first instance to Germanic languages we may note: Topf [pot] - pot; boat - tub; wait - täuwen [tarry]; hurry - Ruhe [rest]; care - reck; Balken [beam] - Klobe [log], club. If we take the other Indo-Germanic languages into consideration, the number of relevant instances grows accordingly; for example, capere [Latin for "take"] - packen [German for "seize"]; ren [Latin for "kidney"] - Niere [German for "kidney"]; leaf - folium [Latin for "leaf"]; dum-a [Russian for "thought"], õìüò [Greek for "spirit", "courage"] - mêdh, mûdha [Sanscrit for "mind"], Mut [German for "courage"]; rauchen [German for "to smoke"] - Kur-ít [Russian for "to smoke"]; kreischen [German for "to shriek"] - to shriek, etc.’

Abel tries to explain the phenomenon of reversal of sound as a doubling or reduplication of the root. Here we should find some difficulty in following the philologist. We remember in this connection how fond children are of playing at reversing the sound of words and how frequently the dream-work makes use of a reversal of the representational material for various purposes. (Here it is no longer letters but images whose order is reversed.) We should therefore be more inclined to derive reversal of sound from a factor of deeper origin.¹

In the correspondence between the peculiarity of the dream-work mentioned at the beginning of the paper and the practice discovered by philology in the oldest languages, we may see a confirmation of the view we have formed about the regressive, archaic character of the expression of thoughts in dreams. And we psychiatrists cannot escape the suspicion that we should be better at understanding and translating the language of dreams if we knew more about the development of language.²

¹ For the phenomenon of reversal of sound (metathesis), which it perhaps even more intimately related to the dream-work than are contradictory meanings (antithesis), compare also Meyer-Rinteln (1909).

² It is plausible to suppose, too, that the original antithetical meaning of words exhibits the ready-made mechanism which is exploited for various purposes by slips of the tongue that result in the opposite being said..