Graphemes and allographs

The minimum item of writing is a grapheme as a graphic type of language made by hand and perceived by eye. Realised in speech, a grapheme as an invariant has its variants – allographs. Allographs are connected with:

· the position of a letter (either capital or small) – at the beginning/ in the middle/ at the end of a word;

· individual peculiarities of a scribe;

· technical realisation of writing (script type or print type).

On the other hand, psycholinguistically:

1. A grapheme is a class of closely related graphs constituting the smallest unit of speech that will distinguish one word from another in writing.

(Graphs in a single grapheme class are termed allographs. Allographs are units of writing among which there are no significant differences, while graphemes are units that represent minimal contrasts for distinguishing words in writing.)

2. A grapheme is not so much a single letter as a collection of letters, all of which are written the same. In other words, a grapheme is not one letter, but a variety of letters, any of which is accepted by readers as making the same contrast distinguishing them from other letters. (These elementary letters are called graphs. The sets of closely related graphs that all are written like the same grapheme are called allographs of each other, or of the particular grapheme.) Allographs are letters that the perceiver learns to treat as equivalent, and to read as the same.

3. A grapheme is not something present at the surface level of written language – it is something that the reader constructs. (We do not see different letters when we are reading a text. Instead, we see significant differences: graphemes instead of graphs. If a pair of letters does not constitute a significant difference, then we do not see them as different. That is why the Japanese have difficulty in distinguishing between English words such as link and rink. There is no contrast between l and r in their language, so not only can they not pronounce the two words as different, but they also have difficulty in hearing them as different. The same feature is characteristic of Russian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian: native speakers of these languages will take the Russian cursive variant of д for English g; and d in the Roman script for g and visa versa. For example: bed becomes beg; daughter is taken for gaughter and so on.)

The number of graphemes in their typical combinations and positions do not coincide in different languages. According to their properties, graphemes are divided into segmental (letters, letter-combinations), morphemic (prefix, suffix, stem, inflexion), conterminous (=conterminal, at the junction or words) and supra-segmental (punctuation and secondary signs).

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