A grapheme is a symbol made up of one or more glyphs—or marks on a page.

Our Latin writing system has 26 letters including vowels and consonants. Of course, we also use numerals 0 to 9 and various symbols such as $, @. %. and & routinely with meaning in our writing, and the variation between capitals and lower case adds meaning to the basic 26 so the total number of graphemes is well over 26. The Russian Cyrillic alphabet has 33 characters and again combines capitalization, symbols and numerals. Chinese pictograms are far more extensive. The Kangxi dictionary is approximately 47,035 graphemes.

So how many is ideal for being able to craft a truly rich written language? With our minuscule set of 26, great novelists have combined them in sequences that paint mental pictures that are often as vivid and compelling as real life. But while 1s and 0s alone can be used to represent characters and thus words in a computer’s “eyes” they cannot be read by humans and enjoyed in the same way a great book using our familiar graphemes can be. So there is some lower limit. How rich is the literature of China with their many thousands of graphemes. Are Chinese novels more, or less able to evoke real life in readers? What is the optimum number of grapheme in an alphabet?

Topics: symbols, letters, Writing systems, alphabets, graphemes