Editing Grapheme (section)

==Glyphs==
{{main|Glyph|Allograph}}
In the same way that the [[surface form]]s of [[phoneme]]s are speech sounds or [[phone (phonetics)|phones]] (and different phones representing the same phoneme are called [[allophone]]s), the surface forms of graphemes are [[glyph]]s (sometimes ''graphs''), namely concrete written representations of symbols (and different glyphs representing the same grapheme are called [[allograph]]s).

Thus, a grapheme can be regarded as an [[abstraction]] of a collection of glyphs that are all functionally equivalent.

For example, in written English (or other languages using the [[Latin alphabet]]), there are two different physical representations of the [[lowercase]] Latin letter "a": "<big>a</big>" and "<big>ɑ</big>". Since, however, the substitution of either of them for the other cannot change the meaning of a word, they are considered to be allographs of the same grapheme, which can be written {{angbr|a}}. Similarly, the grapheme corresponding to "Arabic numeral zero" has a unique semantic identity and Unicode value {{code|U+0030}} but exhibits variation in the form of [[slashed zero]]. Italic and bold face forms are also allographic, as is the variation seen in [[serif]] (as in [[Times New Roman]]) versus [[sans-serif]] (as in [[Helvetica]]) forms.

There is some disagreement as to whether capital and lower case letters are allographs or distinct graphemes. Capitals are generally found in certain triggering contexts that do not change the meaning of a word: a proper name, for example, or at the beginning of a sentence, or all caps in a newspaper headline. In other contexts, capitalization can determine meaning: compare, for example [[Polish language|Polish]] and [[Shoe polish|polish]]: the former is a language, the latter is for shining shoes.

Some linguists consider [[digraph (orthography)|digraphs]] like the {{angbr|sh}} in ''ship'' to be distinct graphemes, but these are generally analyzed as sequences of graphemes. Non-stylistic [[Typographic ligature|ligatures]], however, such as {{angbr|æ}}, are distinct graphemes, as are various letters with distinctive [[diacritic]]s, such as {{angbr|ç}}.

Identical glyphs may not always represent the same grapheme. For example, the three letters {{angbr|A}}, {{angbr|А}} and {{angbr|Α}} appear identical but each has a different meaning: in order, they are the Latin letter [[A]], the Cyrillic letter [[A (Cyrillic)|Azǔ/Азъ]] and the Greek letter [[Alpha]]. Each has its own [[code point]] in Unicode: {{unichar|0041|Latin capital letter A}}, {{unichar|0410|Cyrillic capital letter A}} and {{unichar|0391|Greek capital letter alpha}}.