Manqui wonders and concludes that somehow and somewhere here, perhaps the roots of the Greek dialects he loves so much might be connected with the sayings and writings of the Hellenic Astramigration Group, as well as—unsurprisingly—with the songs of Ai Seitan. They all speak of the time when humans had colors.

The dictionary in hand, to which Manqui returns whenever anxiety grips him while trying to correctly teach Cho, groups the entire Greek language into roughly fifteen primary roots, which derive either from human phonemes or cries, or from the sounds of tools or the sounds of the elements of nature.

He learns that language begins mainly from the newborn infant. As soon as it emerges from its mother’s womb, it lets out an endless “Aaa…,” which it utters without any effort. The root a- could be the single root of all languages.

In Greek, a expresses a wide range of feelings and emotions—admiration, surprise, joy, sorrow, despair, disappointment, approval, the end of waiting—each with different prosody. It absorbs all the other vowels and transforms the vowels of preceding and following syllables. It participates in most of the primary roots: ba-, da-, ma-, pa-, ta-, pha-, kha-.

The Greek language named it alpha from arō, as in arariskō (“to fit, join”) or “I begin speech,” plus the root pha- as in phēmi (“I say”) or phainō (“I reveal”), which denote matters of speech. Thus it was originally arpha and became alpha for greater euphony.

The word rhíza (“root”) comes either from radinos, which became radi and thus the same as razi, then rhiza through metathesis; or from rheō (“to flow”) and za (“earth”), which became rheza and then rhiza, because it “flows toward the earth.” Foundation—the thing from which something grows—lineage, family.

Radinos certainly comes from the word rhabdos (“rod”), which becomes rhabdinos: thin, elongated, delicate, slender, nimble.
But rhabdos derives from brychaomai and the root ra-, raiō, raïstazō, and patassō, which becomes something like rapatos, raptos, rhabdos. It was the rod, the fishing pole, the javelin, a sign of authority, an instrument of correction, a shepherd’s staff, a line, a verse.

Brychaomai (“to roar”) happens to have an impressive variety of meanings because it comes from the root ra-, as in rassō, raiō, rabassō, phrassō, rhabdos, brazzō. Yet these varied threads are harmoniously woven together in the warp of the primitive hunter’s experience, in relation to the beasts that spa-ra-ssō (“tear apart”) their prey.

How wild animals behave when seizing their victim, then how they tear apart the captured creature, and how humans attempt to snatch the ready prey using rods—all this is expressed with words stemming from the root ra-.

It derives from the roar of carnivores, which they emit at the moment they devour their prey—especially when threatened by would-be thieves or by other members of their own pack.

For the instinct of devouring is non-negotiable, despite the protocol establishing priority, which is upheld more by force than by submission, accompanied by a kind of music—an undercurrent of constant roars and displays of jaws.

One can observe all this even in domesticated animals. When these animals perceive a threat to their food, just like wild beasts, they emit a continuous brrragngg…—they roar.

The verb that expresses most of what occurs in the aforementioned process is rhēgnumi, since it means: to break, shatter, smash, split, cut, destroy, raise, arouse, cry out, strike and knock down, shout, and stamp the feet—just as one does now to drive away wild dogs.

It is possible that the primitive human—hunter but also thief of the beasts’ prey—imitated their roar to drive them off.

Humans lived for thousands upon thousands of years as wild animals among other wild beasts—an indisputable fact supported by countless archaeological finds across the world.

Be that as it may, what is clear is that the word rhēgnumi, and many others like it, literally drags behind it an entire history—and this is why its meanings are so richly varied.