Precomposed Character & Grapheme on wikipedia

[spir]

On 01/25/2011 10:43 PM, Ali Çehreli wrote:
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>  "spir" <denis.spir at gmail.com> wrote in message
>
>> > This article brought me to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapheme. Seems I
>> > was partially wrong in stating that using "grapheme" to denote what we
>> > commonly think as a character is an error. Possibly "grapheme" in english
>> > and "graphème" in french are not quite synonym. For instance, "ph" is
>> > commonly regarded as a single grapheme in french (<--> phoneme /f/
>> > indeed), so that grapheme and chracter are not at all synonyms; while
>> > according to en-wikipedia's article it may be 2 in english. What do you
>> > think?
>>
>>  No, a grapheme is the common notion of character:
>
> That's my understanding too. I think the article spends too much time comparing
> graphemes and phonemes. The former is about writing, the latter is about speech.

Yop, that's what I understood as well. But it's not the notion I learnt when 
studying linguistics (in french). For instance, the corresponding fr-wikipedia 
article "Graphème" explicitely states that "au" is a grapheme in french (<--> 
phoneme /o/). But it's indeed to characters (even for frenchmen ;-) Reason why 
I initially thought Unicode's use of "grapheme" was so wrong.
Anyway, we still need the extend the meaning of this term to englobe many other 
kinds of characters than plain word-scripting ones. A work that has already 
been for the term "character", both by users and programmers, along generations 
of computing. Even more than for "character" since the original sense of 
"grapheme" is far narrower. Too bad!

Denis
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