graphemes (was: "textels")

[Julian Bradfield]

On 2016-09-19, Christoph Päper <christoph.paeper at crissov.de> wrote:
> If
>
> - encyclopedia
> - encyclopædia
> - encyclopaedia
>
> are all legal spellings of the same word in a writing system, a useful linguistic definition of grapheme should ensure that all three variants have the same number of graphemes.

Such a bizarre definition, which would also entail "color/colour",
"fulfill/fulfil", "sulfur/sulphur" having the same number of
graphemes, would break the first three of your rules of thumb:

> - … whatever goes into a single box in a crossword puzzle.
> - … whatever gets transposed if you reverse a word or generate an anagram.
> - … whatever gets capitalized together in the beginning of a word.

and the fourth is pretty dodgy, as it usually contradicts the others

> - … whatever can never be split up by hyphenation.


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