From: Christoph Päper (christoph.paeper@crissov.de)
Date: Thu Dec 30 2010 - 05:45:31 CST
spir:
>
> (*) I mean here "grapheme" not in the common sense of graphical form of a phoneme, but in the Unicode sense of character in the common sense ;-)
FWIW, that is not the common linguistic sense of the term ‘grapheme’ either.
The most common definition of a grapheme is analogous to that of a phoneme, as the smallest linguistic unit that distinguishes meaning, but since the graphic and the phonic register of language work very differently a grapheme, in general, is not mappable to a phoneme in neither direction. A grapheme is bound to a writing system which itself is bound to a language and a phoneme is bound to a spoken language.
Unicode (mostly) encodes scripts, not writing systems, therefore the linguistic term ‘grapheme’ is useless there and could be reused in a technical sense – as it is.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Dec 30 2010 - 05:53:10 CST