Grapheme


A grapheme designates the atomic unit in written language. Graphemes include letters, Chinese ideograms, numerals, punctuation marks, and other symbols. In a phonological orthography a grapheme corresponds to one phoneme. In spelling systems that are non-phonemic — such as the spellings used most widely for written English — multiple graphemes may represent a single phonemes. These are called digraphs (two graphemes for a single phoneme) and trigraphs (three graphemes). For example, the word ship contains four graphemes (''s'', h, i, and p) but only three phonemes, because sh is a digraph. An example of a trigraph is the tch in itch. Different glyphs can represent the same grapheme. For example, the minuscule letter a can be seen in two variants, with a hook at the top, and without. Not all glyphs are graphemes; for example the logogram ampersand (''&'') represents the word and, which contains three phonemes.

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Category:Linguistics de:Graphem fr:Graphème ru:Буква sl:grafem

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