One of the most surprising discoveries is the manner in which the dream-work deals with those things which are opposed to one another in the latent dream. We already know that agreements in the latent material are expressed in the manifest dream by condensations. Now oppositions are treated in exactly the same way as agreements and are, with special preference, expressed by the same manifest element. An element in a manifest dream, capable of having an opposite, may therefore represent itself as well as its opposite, or may do both simultaneously; only the context can determine which translation is to be chosen. It must follow from this that the particle "no" cannot be represented in the dream, at least not unambiguously. The development of languages furnishes us with a welcome analogy for this surprising behavior on the part of the dream work. Many scholars who do research work in languages have maintained that in the oldest languages opposites--such as strong, weak; light, dark; big, little--were expressed by the same root word. (_The Contradictory Sense of Primitive Words._) In old Egyptian, _ken_ originally meant both strong and weak. In conversation, misunderstanding in the use of such ambiguous words was avoided by the tone of voice and by accompanying gestures, in writing by the addition of so-called determinatives, that is, by a picture that was itself not meant to be expressed. Accordingly, if ken meant strong, the picture of an erect little man was placed after the alphabetical signs, if _ken_, _weak_, was meant, the picture of a cowering man followed. Only later, by slight modifications of the original word, were two designations developed for the opposites which it denoted. In this way, from _ken_ meaning both strong and weak, there was derived a _ken_, strong, and a _ken_, weak. It is said that not only the most primitive languages in their last developmental stage, but also the more recent ones, even the living tongues of to-day have retained abundant remains of this primitive opposite meaning. Let me give you a few illustrations of this taken from C. Abel (1884). In Latin there are still such words of double meaning: _altus_--high, deep, and _sacer_, sacred, accursed. As examples of modifications of the same root, I cite: _clamare_--to scream, _clam_--quiet, still, secret; _siccus_--dry, _succus_--juice. And from the German: _Stimme_--voice, _stumm_--dumb. The comparison of related tongues yields a wealth of examples: English: _lock_; German: _Loch_--hole, _Lücke_--gap. English: _cleave_; German: _kleben_--to stick, to adhere. The English _without_, is to-day used to mean "not with"; that "with" had the connotation of deprivation as well as that of apportioning, is apparent from the compounds: _withdraw_, _withhold_. The German _wieder_, again, closely resembles this.