Re: TEI element for a grapheme?

On 2016-09-27 04:03 PM, Piotr Bański wrote:
> On 27/09/16 21:02, Martin Holmes wrote:
>> 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"?
>
> That's your English bias. ;-) In Polish, we have a graph 'dotted z' and
> a graph 'crossed z' (I'm sure Prof. Bień can quote their established
> standardized names) which for 'users' (bah, take any plausible
> definition) represent a single grapheme.

Yes, this works nicely for a single language group using a single 
script. But there are so many cases which are not so simple. Consider this:

:-)

I typed three "characters" to create a combination sign. In my email 
client, and in my mind, they are distinct characters (as if I'd typed 
"Yay!"). In your client, the software might substitute U+1F600 GRINNING 
FACE, which is a single glyph, and which you might perceive as a single 
character; someone else might receive exactly what I sent, three glyphs, 
and yet still "think of" it as a "character" because they use emojis all 
the time.

It just seems to me that any attempt at a definition which depends on 
the perception of a non-specific, presumably non-expert user is hardly a 
definition at all.

Cheers,
Martin

> Similarly with the grapheme
> realised phonetically as [w], in writing (it can have a tilde across 'l'
> or over 'l'). Or the sound [t] in Russian, spelled with <m> or a 'little
> (capital) T' in writing. This is free variation (context-independent,
> across the population, but I guess you can also see it in the production
> of the same individual). In English, 'plain z' and 'crossed z' can be
> found in this sort of free variation, sometimes.
>
> You can also have complementary (context-dependent) distribution of
> graphs representing the same grapheme, think of word-final vs.
> non-word-final Greek sigma. (In English, in some contexts, word-initial
> <g> and non-word-initial <dg> could qualify though I'm not sure I would
> use this example in a 101-course, due to the diachronic variables that
> have to be taken into consideration here.)
>
> Now, two remarks regarding Emmanuelle's original posting:
> 1. I am still not sure how Emmanuelle wants to define 'grapheme'; I
> think that a bunch of examples might help to solve this particular
> issue, without having to delve too deep into philosophy of language
> and/or semiotics.
>
> 2. <fs> is "feature structure" in TEI-speak. It can represent anything,
> including phonemes. But it definitely is _not_ the "default encoding"
> for phonemes.
>
> Best regards,
>
>   Piotr
>
>>
>> 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
>>>
>>