: In the first place, the letter rho appears to me to be the
general instrument expressing all motion (kinesis). But I have not yet
explained the meaning of this latter word, which is just iesis (going);
for the letter eta was not in use among the ancients, who only employed
epsilon; and the root is kiein, which is a foreign form, the same as
ienai. And the old word kinesis will be correctly given as iesis in
corresponding modern letters. Assuming this foreign root kiein, and
allowing for the change of the eta and the insertion of the nu, we have
kinesis, which should have been kieinsis or eisis; and stasis is the
negative of ienai (or eisis), and has been improved into stasis. Now
the letter rho, as I was saying, appeared to the imposer of names an
excellent instrument for the expression of motion; and he frequently
uses the letter for this purpose: for example, in the actual words
rein and roe he represents motion by rho; also in the words tromos
(trembling), trachus (rugged); and again, in words such as krouein
(strike), thrauein (crush), ereikein (bruise), thruptein (break),
kermatixein (crumble), rumbein (whirl): of all these sorts of movements
he generally finds an expression in the letter R, because, as I imagine,
he had observed that the tongue was most agitated and least at rest in
the pronunciation of this letter, which he therefore used in order
to express motion, just as by the letter iota he expresses the subtle
elements which pass through all things. This is why he uses the letter
iota as imitative of motion, ienai, iesthai. And there is another class
of letters, phi, psi, sigma, and xi, of which the pronunciation is
accompanied by great expenditure of breath; these are used in the
imitation of such notions as psuchron (shivering), xeon (seething),
seiesthai, (to be shaken), seismos (shock), and are always introduced by
the giver of names when he wants to imitate what is phusodes (windy). He
seems to have thought that the closing and pressure of the tongue in
the utterance of delta and tau was expressive of binding and rest in
a place: he further observed the liquid movement of lambda, in the
pronunciation of which the tongue slips, and in this he found the
expression of smoothness, as in leios (level), and in the word
oliothanein (to slip) itself, liparon (sleek), in the word kollodes
(gluey), and the like: the heavier sound of gamma detained the slipping
tongue, and the union of the two gave the notion of