graphemes (was: "textels")

[Dalley Mark (South West Commissioning Support)]

I think the key phrase is "user-perceived". And you don't need to involve complex scripts either.

For instance as an English-speaking person, I would perceive the "æ" in "encyclopædia" as being two characters (albeit shoved together somewhat). The argument for this is that the word can equally well be rendered as "encyclopaedia".

A Danish or Norwegian speaker, on the other hand, would perceive "æ" (as in "ære" or "æsj!") as being a single indivisible character.

Mark Dalley

-----Original Message-----
From: Unicode [mailto:unicode-bounces at unicode.org] On Behalf Of Janusz S. Bien
Sent: 19 September 2016 07:40
To: Christoph Päper
Cc: unicode Unicode Discussion
Subject: graphemes (was: "textels")

On Sun, Sep 18 2016 at 21:40 CEST, christoph.paeper at crissov.de writes:
> Janusz S. Bien <jsbien at mimuw.edu.pl>:
>> 
>> 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.
>> 
>>> User-Perceived Character. What everyone thinks of as a character in their script.
>> 
>> […] the definitions are language/locale dependent.
>
> A writing system is (usually) language-dependent, a script is not, 
> although some scripts have been used exclusively (or prominently) in a 
> single writing system with a single language.

It depends of course what do you mean exactly by script, and which meaning of term is intended in the definition of User-Perceived Character. But "a user" is definitely language/locale dependent :-)

> So definition (1) of ‘grapheme’ would be appropriate for linguistics,
> (2) maybe for typography and computer science, but it’Í extremely 
> vague.

I think that 'grapheme' (2) in the present wording is simply incorrect. I suspect it is not used in the standard at all.

Searching the Unicode site I found only one use of 'grapheme' alone:

http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2000/00274-N2236-grapheme-joiner.htm

        Graphemes are sequences of one or more encoded characters that
        correspond to what users think of as characters.

I guess the intention of 'grapheme' (2) was to describe it without any reference to computer encoding, which is definitely an extremely difficult task.

Best regards

Janusz


-- 
                           ,   
Prof. dr hab. Janusz S. Bien -  Uniwersytet Warszawski (Katedra Lingwistyki Formalnej) Prof. Janusz S. Bien - University of Warsaw (Formal Linguistics Department) jsbien at uw.edu.pl, jsbien at mimuw.edu.pl, http://fleksem.klf.uw.edu.pl/~jsbien/

-----Original Message-----
From: Unicode [mailto:unicode-bounces at unicode.org] On Behalf Of Janusz S. Bien
Sent: 19 September 2016 07:40
To: Christoph Päper
Cc: unicode Unicode Discussion
Subject: graphemes (was: "textels")

On Sun, Sep 18 2016 at 21:40 CEST, christoph.paeper at crissov.de writes:
> Janusz S. Bien <jsbien at mimuw.edu.pl>:
>> 
>> 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.
>> 
>>> User-Perceived Character. What everyone thinks of as a character in their script.
>> 
>> […] the definitions are language/locale dependent.
>
> A writing system is (usually) language-dependent, a script is not, 
> although some scripts have been used exclusively (or prominently) in a 
> single writing system with a single language.

It depends of course what do you mean exactly by script, and which meaning of term is intended in the definition of User-Perceived Character. But "a user" is definitely language/locale dependent :-)

> So definition (1) of ‘grapheme’ would be appropriate for linguistics,
> (2) maybe for typography and computer science, but it’Í extremely 
> vague.

I think that 'grapheme' (2) in the present wording is simply incorrect. I suspect it is not used in the standard at all.

Searching the Unicode site I found only one use of 'grapheme' alone:

http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2000/00274-N2236-grapheme-joiner.htm

        Graphemes are sequences of one or more encoded characters that
        correspond to what users think of as characters.

I guess the intention of 'grapheme' (2) was to describe it without any reference to computer encoding, which is definitely an extremely difficult task.

Best regards

Janusz


-- 
                           ,   
Prof. dr hab. Janusz S. Bien -  Uniwersytet Warszawski (Katedra Lingwistyki Formalnej) Prof. Janusz S. Bien - University of Warsaw (Formal Linguistics Department) jsbien at uw.edu.pl, jsbien at mimuw.edu.pl, http://fleksem.klf.uw.edu.pl/~jsbien/