Lydian Letter Ss

It marks the plain s sound, like the first sound in English “sun.”

Lydian was written in its own alphabet; Latin s is a scholar's way to represent this sound, not the Lydian character itself.

Why do Lydian sources write ś or s?

The glyph stayed the same; scholarly transliteration changed.

Older Lydian studies write 𐤮 as ś for the plain s sound and use s for a palatalized s-like sound, made with the tongue raised toward the roof of the mouth. As of 2026, eDiAna's corpus uses a modern convention: 𐤮 is s, while the distinct 𐤳 is š. The Ss in Unicode's English name is a label, not a doubled Latin spelling.

Where does Lydian fit among ancient scripts?

It is an alphabet from ancient Anatolia, now part of Turkey.

Unicode 16.0.0 dates Lydian inscriptions and coins from the end of the eighth or beginning of the seventh century BCE through the third century BCE; longer, well-preserved texts come mainly from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Stone inscriptions are chiefly funerary, with decrees too; seals identify owners, and objects bear dedications.

Unicode 16.0.0 describes the Anatolian alphabets as probably adapted from Greek, while stressing that their letter sets and shapes are distinct. Lydian is grouped with the Lycian and Carian scripts, and the Lydian language is related to Hittite, Palaic, Luwian, Lycian, and Carian. These broad connections do not identify a particular Greek ancestor for 𐤮.