I argue that one of the central enterprises of Western philosophy is the defense of orality in lieu of a defense of truth. In this sense, grammatical markers – the chief instrument of enforcement of orality in Indo-European languages – has been a critical measure of success in philosophy and in design. This lecture traces some of the key milestones in constructing this deep-rooted conviction in the truth-value of grammatical markers; it begins with a nineteenth-century debate on Sanskrit and Chinese between Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat and Wilhelm von Humboldt in relation to the most and least grammatical of languages. Despite the prevailing belief that the phonetic alphabet is the most advanced thinking tool as Bacon and Hegel would have us believe, there has been critical voices such as Leibniz who desired a philosophical language (characteristia universalis) similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics or Chinese characters.