Re: TEI element for a grapheme?

Hi Martin,

(briefly)

On 28/09/16 01:24, Martin Holmes wrote:
[..]
> 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.

Sometimes it's the best thing you can get on your way to the concept, 
and perhaps this is what we're looking at, here. A "mentalistic" 
definition of the phoneme, coming from the school of thought represented 
by de Courtenay quoted earlier ("Kazan school" [1]), but this time given 
by his student Mikołaj Kruszewski, says that it's "the speaker's 
intention, at which he aims, but does not arrive for a variety of 
reasons". Not a definition at all, according to your (respectable) 
criteria, and at the same time the most beautiful 'definition' of the 
phoneme that I have encountered :-)

I'm not arguing that the other definition (or characterisation, etc.) is 
super-precise, I just wanted to illustrate how it could be made sense 
of. By no means would I like to see it in the Guidelines as _the_ 
definition of an element.

Cheers,

   Piotr

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazan_school




-- 
Piotr Bański, Ph.D.
Senior Researcher,
Institut für Deutsche Sprache,
R5 6-13
68-161 Mannheim, Germany