In a phonemic orthography, a grapheme corresponds to one phoneme. In spelling systems that are non-phonemic such as the spellings used most widely for written English multiple graphemes may represent a single phoneme. These are called digraphs (two graphemes for a single phoneme) and trigraphs (three graphemes). For example, the word ship contains four graphemes (s, h, i, and p) but only three phonemes, because sh is a digraph.
Different glyphs can represent the same grapheme, meaning they are allographs. For example, the minuscule letter a can be seen in two variants, with a hook at the top , and without <ɑ>. Not all glyphs are graphemes in the phonological sense; for example the logogram ampersand (&) represents the Latin word et (English ‘and’), which contains two phonemes.
See also
- Allography
- Digraph (orthography)
- Character (computing)
- Glyph
- Letter (alphabet)
- Sign (semiotics)
- Trigraph (orthography)
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Last updated on Saturday October 04, 2008 at 10:48:56 PDT (GMT -0700)
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