Peter T. Daniels scripsit:

> > If you don't like my pirating of the term "grapheme" for this purpose,
> > I invite you to provide a substitute term.
>
> What purpose, term for what?

The purpose of establishing a term for "a class of written marks which the
participants in a tradition of writing recognize, without hedging, as
corresponding to one of the abstract basic units of the system."
Thus a-z A-Z are among the graphemes of English, but neither cedilla
by itself nor even c-cedilla is, despite its occasional appearance in the word
"façade". Certainly alpha is not.

> BTW if you know who you pirated it from, please let Gerhard Augst know
> -- he wrote a rilly big book about it & couldn't decide.

The Unicode Standard used this term between versions 3.0 and 4.0, when they
abandoned it in favor of the unanalyzable (in this context) term "grapheme
cluster".

--
"There is no real going back. Though I John Cowan
may come to the Shire, it will not seem jcowan@...
the same; for I shall not be the same. http://www.reutershealth.com
I am wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
and a long burden. Where shall I find rest?" --Frodo