Vachaspati Misra

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Vachaspati Misra was a philosopher of the Indian Nyaya school from the 8th-9th century AD, who worked on problems of perception, epistemology and language (as they relate to religion).

Among his observations on language is this notion that appears to reflect the modern idea of a phoneme (from his commentary on bhAmati):

When we recognize a letter k from an utterance and then recognize it again from another utterance, we in fact re-identify it as the same token (and not just as a "similar" one). The letters k and ch are like k-type and ch-type, which, being universal, are indestructible, and the actual utterances are tokens of this type.

A possible modern interpretation of this would be that the individual sounds constitute universals (categories in sound space), of which specific utterances are instances.

Earlier Mimamsa philosophers had talked about the distinction between spoken sound instances (shabda) and written sound-types (varNa), but this is the clearest enunciation of a notion close to the phoneme.

Other works by Vachaspati include a commentary on the Nyaya philosopher Uddyotkara.