Plato, Sound and Typography; Research

The first recorded realisation of a semiotic implication of human use of sound, letters and their meaning, was recorded in Plato's Symposium;

"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"