On ‘grapheme’: recurrent problems and new reflections

Some problems connected to the term/concept 'grapheme' are reviewed. The major point concerns the question of the dependency of writing from speech or language. We distinguish between a semiotic dependency and an epistemological one. A writing system is a code, most of this code, in glottographic systems, re-codes the code of a given language (mainly the phonological one): in this sense we accept the concept of dependency of writing system (especially glottographic). The relation between grapheme and phoneme, however, is shown to be more epistemological than semiotic. We try to overcome this. The anthropological model offers solutions that are particulary interesting for ancient scripts. We intro-duce a concept of grapheme that covers different areas of functions: from the core glottographic to the visual one.