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Before presenting a few problems and ideas concerning the origins of the Lydian alphabet, there are some important terminological points that deserve to be briefly discussed.1 In common with other disciplines, grammatology may sometimes suffer the insidious problems of any terminological system, especially when this system is built upon a natural language. Words used in a specific technical language may, and this is usually the case, undergo the same processes of language-change that are typical of our everyday language. Restrictions or broadenings of the usages of a term, in particular, are very common, together with metaphorical and metonymical extensions. Such changes do not necessarily need long periods of time to emerge and they co-exist with the ‘original’ (if one may say so) meanings. So terms like ‘grapheme’ or ‘letter’, just to cite a couple, may occasionally be understood in rather divergent ways. But the same can also be said for ‘character’, ‘sign’, ‘shape’ or ‘script’. ‘Grapheme’ will not be used in the next section of this paper because it is of little relevance, at least when conceived as it is conceived here. ‘Grapheme’ may be understood at least in two different general ways: (1) as a predicate, (2) as a ‘thing’. Once we define the grapheme as the «smallest distinctive unit of a writing system»2 we are considering it a ‘thing’.3 This usage is in fact widespread and very practical. Nonetheless it may lead to a too concrete understanding of ‘grapheme’. Grapheme, parallel to ‘phoneme’, should more safely be defined as the class of all equivalent smallest distinctive units of a writing system, not a concrete unit in itself. Obviously, such a set may contain only one unit, but this should not allow the metonymical process transferring ‘grapheme’ to its instanciation(s). A major concern is, however, the use of ‘grapheme’ as a predicate. Saying that «X is a grapheme» means nothing more than «X has a graphemic relevance».

From the predicaments of grammatology to the origin of the Lydian (and other) scripts