Re: TEI element for a grapheme?

This is a really interesting discussion, but I must confess that this:

"Graphemes are sequences of one or more encoded characters that
correspond to what users think of as characters."

is one of the most unhelpful definitions imaginable. Who is a user, and 
who can tell what he or she might choose to think of as a "character"?

Cheers,
Martin

On 2016-09-27 11:21 AM, Janusz S. Bień wrote:
> 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
>