banished the cruder sort as unworthy to have a place in great languages and
literatures.

We can see clearly enough that letters or collocations of letters do by
various degrees of strength or weakness, length or shortness, emphasis or
pitch, become the natural expressions of the finer parts of human feeling
or thought. And not only so, but letters themselves have a significance;
as Plato observes that the letter rho accent is expressive of motion, the
letters delta and tau of binding and rest, the letter lambda of smoothness,
nu of inwardness, the letter eta of length, the letter omicron of
roundness. These were often combined so as to form composite notions, as
for example in tromos (trembling), trachus (rugged), thrauein (crush),
krouein (strike), thruptein (break), pumbein (whirl),--in all which words
we notice a parallel composition of sounds in their English equivalents.
Plato also remarks, as we remark, that the onomatopoetic principle is far
from prevailing uniformly, and further that no explanation of language
consistently corresponds with any system of philosophy, however great may
be the light which language throws upon the nature of the mind. Both in
Greek and English we find groups of words such as string, swing, sling,
spring, sting, which are parallel to one another and may be said to derive
their vocal effect partly from contrast of letters, but in which it is
impossible to assign a precise amount of meaning to each of the expressive
and onomatopoetic letters. A few of them are directly imitative, as for
example the omega in oon, which represents the round form of the egg by the
figure of the mouth: or bronte (thunder), in which the fulness of the
sound of the word corresponds to the thing signified by it; or bombos
(buzzing), of which the first syllable, as in its English equivalent, has
the meaning of a deep sound. We may observe also (as we see in the case of
the poor stammerer) that speech has the co-operation of the whole body and
may be often assisted or half expressed by gesticulation. A sound or word