Re: -eme and related suffixes

Joachim Pense wrote:
>
> Am Sat, 31 Dec 2005 14:35:13 GMT schrieb Peter T. Daniels:
>
> > Joachim Pense wrote:
> >
> >> I guess there is a scheme accepted by most linguists, only I don't know it.
> >> Using my uneducated gut feeling, in Chinese writing I would call the
> >> strokes "graphemes" (of course these are abstractions of strokes - they are
> >> rendered differently in different writing styles), the elementary signs of
> >> which the characters are composed for example the radicals) would be
> >> something like "graphical syllables", and a character would be - well, a
> >> character. A word in modern Chinese typically takes more than one
> >> character.
> >
> > So you do see the problem.
> >
> > Why wouldn't the components be the graphemes, with the strokes something
> > like phonetic features?
> >
>
> Because components can be composed of other components, up to two or three
> hierarchy levels. If you want to call the components "graphemes", you might
> analogously also want to consider to call the Japanese syllables
> "phonemes".

Exactly. There's no coherent way to apply the term "grapheme" to the
Chinese writing system.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: -eme and related suffixes
    ... > Joachim Pense wrote: ... >> Using my uneducated gut feeling, in Chinese writing I would call the ... >> character. ... If you want to call the components "graphemes", ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: -eme and related suffixes
    ... Peter T. Daniels: ... > Joachim Pense wrote: ... >>> Why wouldn't the components be the graphemes, ... Why not use it to denote the strokes? ...
    (sci.lang)
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