Mr. Daniels,

> Why aren't the seven basic brushstrokes the "graphemes" of Chinese?
> Aren't they much more the "atoms" of Chinese writing?

You could call them this way, but those mere basic brushstrokes just don't
carry any meaning in themselves.

> If you can't tell me what you want "graphemes" to do, I see no use for
> the term.

Well, regarding Han-characters, there are quite a lot of graphical elements
which do have a meaning but are not part of any of the various lists of
"radicals" (the most frequently used being the Kangxi-radical system).

(e.g. 寺 ("temple"), which appears in many characters (詩, 侍, 時, 特...)
but is NOT a Kangxi-radical.)

Therefore, I would call the radicals an incomplete subset of the graphemes
of Chinese writing.


Mind by the way that some of the graphemes can be further subdivided into
other graphemes, so graphically speaking, there are combinations of certain
graphemes which have a distinct meaning.
E.g.: 音 is not just a mixture of 立 and 日, but a unit on its own.



The term "grapheme" is used by Japanologists and Sinologists a lot,
actually.



Berthold Frommann
(Free University Berlin, Department of East-Asian Studies)




P.S.: I wouldn't use the term when describing writing systems other than
Han, logographic cuneiform, hieroglyphics and the like. As Marco Cimarosti
pointed out, it's extremely silly to analyse "B" into I and 3.