The grapheme as a universal basic unit of writing

Abstract

The grapheme appears to be a central concept of grapholinguistics. However, there is no consensus on how it should be defined. Some use the concept of grapheme in their work but fail to give a definition while others altogether reject it. When the concept is defined, it is interpreted either as a written unit which refers to a phoneme (this is termed the referential view), or as a written unit that is lexically distinctive (analogical view), which is tested via written minimal pairs such as <house> and <mouse> analogously to phonological minimal pairs which can be used to discover phonemes. A problem of these two views is that they are restricted to alphabets. A universal conception of the grapheme inclusive of all types of writing systems would make possible the uniform description and, consequently, the comparison of diverse writing systems. Such a conception is proposed here: Graphemes are units of writing which are (1) lexically distinctive, (2) have linguistic value (mostly by referring to phonemes, syllables, morphemes, etc.), and are (3) minimal. These criteria are characterised in detail, and examples from writing systems such as Arabic, Chinese, Devanāgarī, German, Japanese, Korean, Tamil, and Thai highlight their cross-linguistic applicability.

The basic grammatological unit in Vietnam’s Nom script and its relationship with those in Chinese script

“…A recent study asserts that graphemes are the universal basic unit of a writing system (Meletis, 2019). For Nom script, this unit is chữ .…”

“…It is a graphic unit organized as a square-shaped whole to express a word or syllable in Vietnamese. In order to realize its functions as a grapheme, this basic grammatological unit, of course, needs to manifest itself in some relations and the research on chữ also needs to put it in relations and equivalents (Augst, 1986: 1; Meletis, 2019: 26–49).…”

Bound Vowels Grapheme Representation in Balinese Script

“…The minimal unit representing the unity of form or fundamental entity in the writing system is called a grapheme. Table 3 presents three criteria for defining graphemes that can be applied universally across various writing systems: 1) the lexical distinctiveness criterion (condition 1), 2) the linguistic value criterion (condition 2), and 3) the minimum criterion (condition 3) [13].…”

A lexical and contrastive analysis of zì字

“…There again, it is striking to see that some linguists present zì 字 as corresponding to graphemes (see Arcodia and Basciano, 2021). 1 Now, the definition of a grapheme varies among linguists (see Kohrt, 1986;Meletis, 2019). Yet, graphemes, like phonemes and morphemes in their own ways, represent basic elements.…”

“…2. As proposed byMeletis (2019), we should look for a definition of grapheme as a universal basic unit of writing. However, in order to embrace all writing systems and avoid the limitation of graphemes to phonographic writings, graphemes should not be treated as signs of phonemes nor as lexical units.…”