graphemes (was: "textels")

[Christoph Päper]

Julian Bradfield <jcb+unicode at inf.ed.ac.uk>:
> 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,

It’s not a bizarre definition at all, but one could also assume two or three different writing systems.

> would break the first three of your rules of thumb:

It would, at least partially.

> and the fourth is pretty dodgy, as it usually contradicts the others
> 
>> - … whatever can never be split up by hyphenation.

It’s not phrased well and it does contradict the other rules of thumb sometimes indeed, but together they often work reasonably well to separate clear cases from questionable ones which are likely to be treated differently by different scholars.