Grapheme

A grapheme is an linguistic symbol within a writing system.

• AKA: Writing System Character, Written Linguistic Symbol.
• Context:
  • It can (typically) be a member of a Language Grapheme Set.
  • It can (typically) be used by a Linguistic Agent to compose written utterances.
  • It can be represented by different Glyphs (e.g. Fonts).
  • It can be a part of a Grapheme String, such as an Orthographic Word.
  • It can range from being an English Language Character, Chinese Language Character, German Language Character, ...
  • …
• Example(s):
  • any Alphabetic Letter (member of a Language Alphabet).
    • any Member of: {a, b, c, ..., y, z}, in English Writing System.
    • any Member of: {α, β, γ, δ, ..., ψ, ω}, in Greek Writing System (along with Punctuation).
    • any Member of: {ب,., ة, ..., ج, ظ, نً}, in Arabic Writing System (along with Punctuation).
  • any Punctuation.
    • including Punctuation Marks and Whitespaces.
  • any Numeral Grapheme.
    • any Member of: {0, 1, 2, ..., 9}
    • any Member of: {I, V, X, L, C, M}.
  • any Math Symbol.
  • any Economic Symbol, such as ®, ©, and currency symbols.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • a Computer Character.
  • a Phoneme.
• See: Alphanumeric Character, HTML Character, Letter (Alphabet), Typographic Ligature, Numerical Digit, Graphemics.

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References

2020

• (Wikipedia, 2020) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/grapheme Retrieved:2020-3-8.
  • In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest unit of a writing system of any given language. An individual grapheme may or may not carry meaning by itself, and may or may not correspond to a single phoneme of the spoken language. In other words, a grapheme is a letter or a set of letters that represent a sound (more correctly, phoneme) in a word. Graphemes include alphabetic letters, typographic ligatures, Chinese characters, numerical digits, punctuation marks, and other individual symbols. A grapheme can also be construed as a graphical sign that independently represents a portion of linguistic material.

    The word grapheme, coined in analogy with phoneme, is derived , and the suffix -eme by analogy with phoneme and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called graphemics.

    The concept of graphemes is abstract and similar to the notion in computing of a character. By comparison, a specific shape that represents any particular grapheme in a specific typeface is called a glyph. For example, the grapheme corresponding to the abstract concept of "the Arabic numeral one" has a distinct glyph with identical meaning (an allograph) in each of many typefaces (such as, for example, a serif form as in Times New Roman and a sans-serif form as in Helvetica).

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