Aw: Re: TEI element for a grapheme?

dear all,

An intriguing discussion of signs! Following Pulgram's sign theory a grapheme represents the smallest distinctive visual unit of a graphic system in accordance with phoneme being the smallest contrastive linguistic unit to bring a change of meaning with the phon being the speech realiziation sound. Accordingly the written realization of a grapheme is a graph and its variants are allographs. 

Symbolism and thus symbols are not restricted to the realm of visualization or verbalisation (graphic, phonetic percepts), but may also come from visual, auditory, olfactive, kinesthetic etc. percepts (according to Dan Sperber). According this this cognitive-semiotic view symbolism uses a signals elements, acts or utterances that exist, and are also interpreted, independent of it (Sperber) and they have usually a variety of meanings - the value of a symbol is usually determined by the underlying knowledge of the recipient / creator of the symbol. 

Hope this is useful 
best, Christian



______________________________
Dr. Christian Prager
"Textdatenbank und Wörterbuch des Klassischen Maya"
Arbeitsstelle der NRW Akademie der 
Wissenschaften und der Künste
Universität Bonn
Abteilung für Altamerikanistik
Oxfordstrasse 15
53111 Bonn
Tel. 0228 73 61 63
www.mayawoerterbuch.de


> Gesendet: Dienstag, 27. September 2016 um 21:02 Uhr
> Von: "Martin Holmes" <[email protected]>
> An: [email protected]
> Betreff: 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
> >
>