Plato, Cratylus, section 421c

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[421c] and indeed some people pronounce it so.

Hermogenes
I think you have knocked these words to pieces manfully, Socrates; but if anyone should ask you what propriety or correctness there was in these words that you have employed—ἰόν and ρἕον and δοῦν—

Socrates
What answer should I make? Is that your meaning?

Hermogenes
Yes, exactly.

Socrates
We acquired just now one way of making an answer with a semblance of sense in it.

Hermogenes
What way was that?

Socrates
Saying, if there is a word we do not know about, that it is of foreign origin.

Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 12 translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921.

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