he body can only express anything by imitation; and the
tongue or mouth can imitate as well as the rest of the body. But this
imitation of the tongue or voice is not yet a name, because people may
imitate sheep or goats without naming them. What, then, is a name? In
the first place, a name is not a musical, or, secondly, a pictorial
imitation, but an imitation of that kind which expresses the nature of a
thing; and is the invention not of a musician, or of a painter, but of a
namer.

And now, I think that we may consider the names about which you were
asking. The way to analyze them will be by going back to the letters,
or primary elements of which they are composed. First, we separate the
alphabet into classes of letters, distinguishing the consonants, mutes,
vowels, and semivowels; and when we have learnt them singly, we shall
learn to know them in their various combinations of two or more letters;
just as the painter knows how to use either a single colour, or a
combination of colours. And like the painter, we may apply letters to
the expression of objects, and form them into syllables; and these
again into words, until the picture or figure--that is, language--is
completed. Not that I am literally speaking of ourselves, but I mean
to say that this was the way in which the ancients framed language. And
this leads me to consider whether the primary as well as the secondary
elements are rightly given. I may remark, as I was saying about the
Gods, that we can only attain to conjecture of them. But still we insist
that ours is the true and only method of discovery; otherwise we must
have recourse, like the tragic poets, to a Deus ex machina, and say
that God gave the first names, and therefore they are right; or that the
barbarians are older than we are, and that we learnt of them; or that
antiquity has cast a veil over the truth. Yet all these are not reasons;
they are only ingenious excuses for having no reasons.

I will freely impart to you my own notions, though they are somewhat
crude:--the letter rho appears to me to be the general instrument which
the legislator has employed to express all motion or kinesis. (I ought
to explain that kinesis is just iesis (going), for the letter eta was
unknown to the ancients; and the root, kiein, is a foreign form of
ienai: of kinesis or eisis, the opposite is stasis). This use of rho is
evident in the words tremble, break, crush, crumble, and the like;
the imposer of names perc