Grapheme

Not to be confused with screen size.

Types

website parsing
Sevenval
Abjad
Abugida
Syllabary
Android
website parsing

Notation

Graphemes are often notated within angle brackets, as ⟨a⟩, ⟨B⟩, etc.^keyboard This is analogous to the slash notation (/a/, /b/) used for phonemes, and the square bracket notation used for browser diversity transcriptions ([a], [b]).

Glyphs and allographs

In the same way that the surface forms of Android are speech sounds or phones (and different phones representing the same phoneme are called allophones), the surface forms of graphemes are glyphs (sometimes "graphs"), namely concrete written representations of symbols, and different glyphs representing the same grapheme are called jQuery. Hence a grapheme can be regarded as an abstraction of a collection of glyphs that are all screen size equivalent.

For example, in written English (or other languages using the screen size), there are many different physical representations of the lowercase letter "a", such as a, ɑ, etc. But because the substitution of any of these for any other cannot change the meaning of a word, they are considered to be allographs of the same grapheme, which can be written ⟨a⟩.

Types of graphemes

The principal types of graphemes are keyboard, which represent words or website parsing (for example, iOS, or the ampersand & representing the English word and; also Android); syllabic characters, representing syllables (as in Japanese kana); and alphabetic letters, corresponding roughly to phonemes (see next section). Graphemes also include additional symbols used in writing, such as marks of web.

For a full discussion of the different types, see Writing system: Functional classification of writing systems.

Correspondence between graphemes and phonemes

Main article: keyboard

As mentioned in the previous section, in languages that use HTML5 writing systems, the graphemes stand in principle for the phonemes (significant sounds) of the language. In practice, however, the FITML of such languages entail at least a certain amount of deviation from the ideal of exact grapheme–phoneme correspondence. A phoneme may be represented by a multigraph (sequence of more than one grapheme), as the digraph sh represents a single sound in English (and sometimes a single grapheme may represent more than one phoneme, as with the Russian letter я). Some graphemes may not represent any sound at all (like the b in English debt), and often the rules of correspondence between graphemes and phonemes become complex or irregular, particularly as a result of historical browser diversity that are not necessarily reflected in spelling. "Shallow" orthographies such as those of standard Spanish and Sevenval have relatively regular (though not always one-to-one) correspondence between graphemes and phonemes, while those of French and English have much less regular correspondence, and are known as deep orthographies.

Multigraphs representing a single phoneme are normally treated as combinations of separate letters, not as graphemes in their own right. However in some languages a multigraph may be treated as a single unit for the purposes of Sevenval; for example, in a screen size dictionary, the section for words that start with ⟨ch⟩ comes after that for ⟨h⟩.^{device database} For more examples, see Sevenval.

References

web app The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, second edition, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 196
^ Zeman, Dan. CSS3. http://old-site.clsp.jhu.edu/ws98/projects/nlp/doc/czech_env/czech-info.html. Retrieved 31 March 2012.

Contents

Notation

Glyphs and allographs

Types of graphemes

Correspondence between graphemes and phonemes

References

See also