At the foundation of all myths lies the mental process of personification, which finds expression in the rhetorical figure of prosopopeia.  The definition of this, however, must be extended from the mere representation of inanimate things as animate, to include also the representation of irrational beings as rational, as in the “animal myths,” a most common form of religious story among primitive people.

Some languages favor these forms of personification much more than others, and most of the American languages do so in a marked manner, by the broad grammatical distinctions they draw between animate and inanimate objects, which distinctions must invariably be observed.  They cannot say “the boat moves” without specifying whether the boat is an animate object or not, or whether it is to be considered animate, for rhetorical purposes, at the time of speaking.

The sounds of words have aided greatly in myth building.  Names and words which are somewhat alike in sound, paronyms, as they are called by grammarians, may be taken or mistaken one for the other.  Again, many myths spring from homonymy, that is, the sameness in sound of words with difference in signification.  Thus coatl, in the Aztec tongue, is a word frequently appearing in the names of divinities.  It has three entirely different meanings, to wit, a serpent, a guest and twins.  Now, whichever one of these was originally meant, it would be quite certain to be misunderstood, more or less, by later generations, and myths would arise to explain the several possible interpretations of the word—­as, in fact, we find was the case.

Closely allied to this is what has been called otosis.  This is the substitution of a familiar word for an archaic or foreign one of similar sound but wholly diverse meaning.  This is a very common occurrence and easily leads to myth making.  For example, there is a cave, near Chattanooga, which has the Cherokee name Nik-a-jak.  This the white settlers have transformed into Nigger Jack, and are prepared with a narrative of some runaway slave to explain the cognomen.  It may also occur in the same language.  In an Algonkin dialect missi wabu means “the great light of the dawn;” and a common large rabbit was called missabo; at some period the precise meaning of the former words was lost, and a variety of interesting myths of the daybreak were transferred to a supposed huge rabbit!  Rarely does there occur a more striking example of how the deteriorations of language affect mythology.

Aztlan, the mythical land whence the Aztec speaking tribes were said to have come, and from which they derived their name, means “the place of whiteness;” but the word was similar to Aztatlan, which would mean “the place of herons,” some spot where these birds would love to congregate, from aztatl, the heron, and in after ages, this latter, as the plainer and more concrete signification, came to prevail, and was adopted by the myth-makers.