> It's a bit like the British 'ö' in 'Coöperative'. Given that I remember one single time I saw that spelling in the wild while visiting the UK, should I now go and write angry letters to all editors that "English really has 27 letters!!"?
Well, no. The 'ö' in 'coöperative' is not a single grapheme; it's two graphemes. The same mark, which we might call U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS, is used with the same significance on any arbitrary letter (OK, any vowel), indicating that the letter is not part of a digraph and should be interpreted alone. This is how the distinction is drawn in writing between a coöp [where hippies work; each 'o' is a separate vowel] and a coop [where chickens live; the 'oo' is a single vowel].
The example I generally use to illustrate the conceptual difference is that, in Mandarin pinyin, é and è represent identical vowels, whereas in French é and è represent two different vowels. There's just one letter "e" in the pinyin example (along with two tone markings), but there are two letters in the French example.
(The French themselves would disagree - they don't include letters like è in their official alphabet - but they are wrong.)
You've gotten so nitpicky that you've apparently started mixing your own terms: graphemes, letters; and you're doing so incorrectly to boot (Muphry's Law, perhaps).
There are characters (U+308 in this codepage), letters ("E" and "e"), accent marks (which require an accompanying letter), and graphemes ("e", but also "ee").
Instead of iteratively correcting each other by refining and redefining words in each response, how about we communicate in good faith on the actual topic: cuneiform.
What do you think I mixed up? I pointed out that é is one grapheme in French and two in Mandarin, and I pointed out that é and è are the same (adorned) letter in Mandarin and two different (unadorned) letters in French. And that ö in English is similar to the Mandarin é, but not to the French é.
You seem to object to the idea that they're distinct letters in French. How would you account for å?
> and graphemes ("e", but also "ee").
Not a universal view, but fully compatible with -- and indeed, suggested by -- everything I said. What are you trying to point out?
Well, no. The 'ö' in 'coöperative' is not a single grapheme; it's two graphemes. The same mark, which we might call U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS, is used with the same significance on any arbitrary letter (OK, any vowel), indicating that the letter is not part of a digraph and should be interpreted alone. This is how the distinction is drawn in writing between a coöp [where hippies work; each 'o' is a separate vowel] and a coop [where chickens live; the 'oo' is a single vowel].
The example I generally use to illustrate the conceptual difference is that, in Mandarin pinyin, é and è represent identical vowels, whereas in French é and è represent two different vowels. There's just one letter "e" in the pinyin example (along with two tone markings), but there are two letters in the French example.
(The French themselves would disagree - they don't include letters like è in their official alphabet - but they are wrong.)