• What is a grapheme?
• Graphemes and phonemes

We explain what a grapheme is, its relationship with the meaning and with the writing itself. Also, what are phonemes.

The graphemes compose a limited, closed and static system.

What is a grapheme?

In linguistics, The minimum and indivisible unit of the writing of any natural language is called grapheme, that is, the minimum set of alphabetic and diacritical signs that are used to represent a language in writing. To distinguish them from other types of language representation, graphemes are usually written in angle brackets or antilambdas ().

Graphemes are abstractions made from written signs, which may or may not correspond to a sound of the language, depending on whether it is a language whose writing system is representation phonetics (that is, each sign represents a sound, like the Latin alphabet) or rather it consists of ideograms of some kind (that is, signs that represent ideas, as in the case of Mandarin).

The relationship between graphemes and their meaning is usually arbitrary, especially in phonetic alphabet languages, since there is no natural relationship between a sign () and its associated sound (/ a /). In other methods of pictographic writing, however, mimetic or imitative residues of the reality.

We must note, however, that the graphemes are not the writing itself, but an abstraction made from it, so that the graphemes make up a limited, closed and static system of language representation.

Thus, the different variants of realization (of materialization) of the same grapheme are known as glyphs: for example, "A" and "a" are glyphs of the grapheme. , as much as they are "g”And“ g ”of the grapheme, since they are just typographic variants.

Graphemes and phonemes

The relationship between graphemes (written) and phonemes (sounds) is, as we said before, arbitrary, since there is no stable relationship between a written sign and a single sound of the language. For example, in Spanish the phoneme / b / corresponds to two forms of written representation: and, while the grapheme is mute, that is, it does not correspond to any phoneme.

Thus, when two graphemes correspond to the same phoneme, it is called a digraph; when there are three, I triplet. In some types of writing, such as that using pictograms, this relationship is even more distant.