cowan@... wrote:

>
> Peter T. Daniels scripsit:
>
> > IOW, it's not the slightest bit like a phoneme, a morpheme, a tagmeme,
> > etc.; so why should it be an -eme word?
>
> As I said, I solicit an alternative term that is less misleading.
>
> > Is <sh> a grapheme of English? <th>? <ng>? <ough>? (NB those four
> > examples are in a deliberate order.)
>
> No, no, no, and no.

But lots of "grapheme"-users use it to refer to such things.

> > What are the graphemes of Chinese?
>
> I don't know.

Me either. See reply to Marco, and also my LACUS Ann Arbor paper.

If I don't know what it is you want to include under (some term), how
can I suggest (some term)?

> > That's like saying there's no /x/ in English despite "Bach."
>
> Indeed it is, and I agree: there is no /x/ in English, though [x] ~ [X]
> occasionally appears as an L1- or L2-contaminated variety of /k/ in certain
> borrowed lexical items. (I use phoneme slashes in a Newtonian manner.)
>
> > > 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".
>
> Mea culpa: I should have said "The Unicode Standard used this term *in the
> above sense*" etc.

Sorry, I don't see a "sense" above!
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...