Re: TEI element for a grapheme?

On Tue, Sep 27 2016 at 19:17 CEST, [email protected] writes:
> Hello,
>
> On 27/09/2016 18:32, Paul Schaffner wrote:
>> But I am probably misunderstanding. In my experience, all discussions
>> of characters, glyphs, graphs, and symbols end in a metaphysical
>> muddle.
>
> Unicode has a definition for all these terms.

Really? What is the Unicode definition of graphs? Is there a Unicode
definition of symbols?

> In the case of grapheme,

In the case of grapheme the only Unicode definition I know of is that
from the glossary of Unicode terms (http://www.unicode.org/glossary/),
which I quote below.

> the key definitions is that of _grapheme cluster_.

Exactly. There is even a definition of extended grapheme cluster. The
term "grapheme" doesn't occur in the standard alone.

> Please see
> <http://unicode.org/reports/tr29/#Grapheme_Cluster_Boundaries>,
> especially the part about Hangul and Devanagari. Reasoning over
> non-Latin scripts makes that discussion always more scientific and less
> metaphysical. :)

The title of the quoted Unicode® Standard Annex #29 is "UNICODE TEXT
SEGMENTATION" and grapheme clusters are just fragment of some
specific texts. It's unclear for me whether they are clusters of
(undefined) grahemes or just graphemic clusters in some vague relation
to the non-Unicode meaning of the term "grapheme".

Let me quote my recent posting to the Unicode mailing list in the thread

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2016-m09/0068.html

entitled "graphemes":

On Wed, Sep 21 2016 at  7:09 CEST, [email protected] writes:

[...]

> Let me remind the issues which started the thread:
>
>
> On Sun, Sep 18 2016 at 12:26 CEST, [email protected] writes:
>> Quote/Cytat - Christoph Päper <[email protected]> (pią, 16
>> wrz 2016, 23:51:38):
>>
>>> Janusz S. Bień <[email protected]>:
>>>>
>>>> 1. Graphemes, if I understand correctly, are language dependent, …
>>>
>>> That’s true in linguistic terminology – well, at least within the
>>> more popular schools of thought –, but not in technical (i.e.
>>> Unicode) jargon.
>
> And what is "grapheme" in "technical (i.e. Unicode) jargon"?
>
>>
>> From the Unicode glossary:
>>
>> Grapheme. (1) A minimally distinctive unit of writing in the context
>> of a particular writing system.[...] (2) What a user thinks of as a
>> character.
>>
>> As for (2), cf.
>>
>> User-Perceived Character. What everyone thinks of as a character in
>> their script.
>>
>> So we have "a user" versus "everyone...in their script" - is the
>> difference intentional? Probably not. Anyway the definitions are
>> language/locale dependent.
>
> Does 'Grapheme' (2) make sense with "a (single?) user"? 
>
> BTW, it is rather well know that the term "phoneme" was proposed first
> by a Polish linguist Jan Niecisław Ignacy Baudouin de Courtenay (13
> March 1845 – 3 November 1929), cf. e.g
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Baudouin_de_Courtenay.  It is much
> less know that he proposed also the term "grapheme". Let me quote
> Alexander Berg's "English Historical Linguistics vol. I" page 230 from
> Google Books:
>
>        Since the introduction of the term grapheme by Baudouin de
>        Courtenay in 1901 (Ruszkiewicz 1976:24-37, 1981 [1978], 20-34),
>        it has been defined in various ways:
>
>        [...]
>
>        As can be seen from these quotatioms, the available definitions
>        can be divided into two groups, corresponding to two main senses,
>        and reflecting "conflicting linguistics views of the status of
>        writing" (Henderson 1985:142):
>
>        1. a letter or cluster of letters referring to or corresponding with a
>        single phoneme;
>
>        2. the minimal distinctive unit of a writing system.
>
> For me the first meaning (not mentioned at all in English Wikipedia) is
> the primary, i.e. more useful, meaning, as is has some practical
> applications e.g. for describing Polish hyphenation rules.

Best regards

Janusz

-- 
                           ,   
Prof. dr hab. Janusz S. Bien -  Uniwersytet Warszawski (Katedra Lingwistyki Formalnej)
Prof. Janusz S. Bien - University of Warsaw (Formal Linguistics Department)
[email protected], [email protected], http://fleksem.klf.uw.edu.pl/~jsbien/