Concept
Grapheme
Overview
smallest semantically distinguishing unit in a written language
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
And not only in the frequency, but in what is termed the violence of the inversions, will this distinction be remarked. In the abundant use of figures, again, we may recognize the same truth. Metaphors, similes, hyperboles, and personifications, are the poet's colours, which he has liberty to employ almost without limit. We characterize as "poetical" the prose which uses these appliances of language with any…
Herbert Spencer, The Philosophy of Style
States what Grapheme is.
But the number of words being almost infinite, the memory found itself quite loaded and oppressed by the multitude of characters which it was obliged to retain. Necessity taught them, therefore, to divide words into their elements, and to invent characters which should represent, not the words themselves, but the elements of which they were composed. In consequence of this invention, every particular word came to be…
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Close in meaning to Grapheme; the term itself is not named.
At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy…
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
Close in meaning to Grapheme; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Grapheme
Related ideas
- Glyph
- Ancient Greek
- Latin alphabet
- Morpheme
- Minimal pair
- Orthography
- Linguistics
- Polish language
- Phoneme
- Writing system
- Spanish language
- A
- Semiotics
- Abstraction
- Digraph (orthography)
- Czech language
Place in the tradition
Part of Alphabetical order.