A grapheme is an linguistic symbol within a writing system.
- AKA: Character, Natural Language Character, Written Linguistic Symbol.
- Context:
- Example(s):
- any Alphabetic Letter (member of a Language Alphabet).
- any Member of: {a, b, c, ..., y, z}, in English.
- any Member of: {α, β, γ, δ, ..., ψ, ω}, in Greek (along with Punctuation).
- any Member of: {ب,. , ة ,..., ج, ظ, نً}, in Arabic (along with Punctuation).
- any Punctuation
- any Numeral Grapheme.
- any Member of: {0, 1, 2, ..., 9}
- any Member of: {I, V, X, L, C, M}.
- any Math Symbol.
- Counter-Example(s):
- See: Alphanumeric Character.
References
- (Wikipedia, 2009) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapheme
- In typography, a grapheme (from the Greek: γράφω, gráphō, "write") is the fundamental unit in written language. Graphemes include alphabetic letters, Chinese characters, numerals, punctuation marks, and all the individual symbols of any of the world's writing systems.
- In a phonemic orthography, a grapheme corresponds to one phoneme. In spelling systems that are non-phonemic – such as the spellings used most widely for written English – multiple graphemes may represent a single phoneme. These are called digraphs (two graphemes for a single phoneme) and trigraphs (three graphemes). For example, the word ship contains four graphemes (s, h, i, and p) but only three phonemes, because sh is a digraph. Conversely, a single grapheme can represent multiple phonemes: the English word "box" has three graphemes, but four phonemes: /bɑːks/.
- Different glyphs can represent the same grapheme, meaning they are allographs. For example, the minuscule letter a can be seen in two variants, with a hook at the top <a>, and without <ɑ>. Not all glyphs are graphemes in the phonological sense; for example the logogram ampersand (&) represents the Latin word et (English ‘and’), which contains two phonemes.