Re: TEI element for a grapheme?

I used to cite this made-up sentence (which nevertheless
is quite possible in my world) to illustrate the well-known
problems with 'ff'.

"Whilst suffering in ffraunce, he thought to himselff of 
the proverb 'Pan darffo treiglo pob tre / Da yw edrych tuag 
adre.'"

'suFFering' and 'himselFF' use the doubled f to 
indicate a voiceless fricative. The former is the 
common spelling, the latter an uncommon one.
But to the everyday user, 'ff' is not a character:
'f' is the character in question, and is the same
'f' as in 'oF' (where it represents a voiced sound).
These are the same everyday users who think
of 't' and 'h' as characters but 'th' as a combination
of characters, not as a single character composed
of graphemes.

'ffraunce' contains an old-fashioned use of 'ff'
to represent an upper-case (capitalized) variant
of "f". Are upper-case and lower-case letters the
same character or not? They are not glyph variants
in the usual sense. And if they *are* different 
characters, then is "ff" simply a glyph variant of "F"?
The usual answer is 'yes.'  /F/ is a character that
may be represented either as grapheme F or as
grapheme cluster ff.

And of course the Welsh 'ff' is usually thought of
(by its users!) as a character in its own right,
quite distinct from 'f'. If we believe these users,
we should regard 'f' as a grapheme, which when
it appears singly represents the character /f/ 
and when it is doubled represents the character 
/ff/.

In actual transcription, it is rare indeed to find
someone who distinguishes character from
glyph in any kind of consistent way: most, I think,
fall back on the Latin alphabet and its extensions
as the default character inventory. (The 'capital'
use of 'ff' is an exception, since I think most
transcribers would capture it as "F" -- not all,
however.)

pfs


On Tue, Sep 27, 2016, at 19:24, Martin Holmes wrote:
> 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
> >>>
> >>
-- 
Paul Schaffner  Digital Library Production Service
[email protected] | http://www.umich.edu/~pfs/