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In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. [1] The word grapheme is derived from Ancient Greek gráphō ('write'), and the suffix -eme by analogy with phoneme and other emic units. The study of graphemes is called graphemics. The concept of graphemes is abstract and similar to the notion in computing of a ...
A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. [1] Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this is the distinction, respectively, between free and bound morphemes.
A phonogram is a grapheme i.e. one or more written characters which represent a phoneme (speech sound), [1] rather than a bigger linguistic unit such as morphemes or words. [2] For example, "igh" is an English-language phonogram that represents the / aɪ / sound in "high".
Syllabaries use graphemes called syllabograms that represent entire syllables or moras. By contrast, logographic (alternatively morphographic) writing systems use graphemes that represent the units of meaning in a language, such as its words or morphemes. Alphabets typically use fewer than 100 distinct symbols, while syllabaries and ...
In an ideal phonemic orthography, there would be a complete one-to-one correspondence between the graphemes (letters) and the phonemes of the language, and each phoneme would invariably be represented by its corresponding grapheme. So the spelling of a word would unambiguously and transparently indicate its pronunciation, and conversely, a ...
In morpheme-based morphology, word forms are analyzed as arrangements of morphemes. A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a word such as independently, the morphemes are said to be in-, de-, pend, -ent, and -ly; pend is the (bound) root and the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes.
A morphophoneme is a theoretical unit at a deeper level of abstraction than traditional phonemes, and is taken to be a unit from which morphemes are built up. A morphophoneme within a morpheme can be expressed in different ways in different allomorphs of that morpheme (according to morphophonological rules).
A morphogram is the representation of a morpheme by a grapheme based solely on its meaning. Kanji is a writing system that makes use of morphograms, where Chinese characters were borrowed to represent native morphemes because of their meanings. Thus, a single character can represent a variety of morphemes which originally all had the same meaning.