Quick: What’s a letter? You might answer: Something that comes in the mail. You wouldn’t be wrong. In fact, without a context that answer is probably more likely than, say, A grapheme (written character) in an alphabetic system of writing. But if we’re talking alphabets or even language, then it’s clear what a letter is. English has 26 of them. Kids learn them at an early age. That’s the easy part.
What’s less easy is knowing what to do with them, those 26 letters of the English alphabet. We string them together, of course, to make words. Easier said than done. Before we even get to words, we use them to make sounds (these are called phonemes). These help us tell the difference between one word and another, like kiss vs. kill. The phoneme /s/ differs from the phoneme /l/, like kissing differs from killing. Big difference.
From grapheme we move to phoneme and then to morpheme. Linguists calls morphemes the smallest grammatical units of language. It’s like a word, only … different. While a word can stand alone, a morpheme may or may not be able to do this. It depends. (Doesn’t everything?) Singulars and plurals are good examples of the difference between words and morphemes. Language is a word (it has a meaning) and a morpheme (it has a grammatical function). Let’s not get into the weeds on what the word language means. (Look it up if you have to.) The grammatical function of language is that of noun. So language is both a word and a morpheme. But if I add -s and make it languages, then it’s still a word (and still a noun), but the -s that marks the plural is only a morpheme (grammatical function of making the noun plural). “S” is a sound (a phoneme, /s/) and it has a grammatical function (it makes things plural, it’s a morpheme), but it’s not a word, not all by itself. S! Uh, not so much.
So then we get to the words, which — unless you’re a linguist — are really the point of this whole alphabet thing. We use words to communicate. It generally works better than grunting phonemes, but the process of learning words (written words, anyway) means you have to learn how to spell the damned things, and this isn’t always easy in English, as just about anyone who’s had any contact with English will tell you. It’s not intuitive; you have to learn it.
Let’s see how this works in practice. A couple of years ago, when my first grandson was five years old, he had a kindergarten assignment. It was pretty straightforward, as far as kindergarten assignments go: Write words that start with the letter …
So here’s my grandson (Kaleb) writing “words that start with the letter …”
His dad (my son) was kind enough to translate.
Like I said, this was an assignment. He probably didn’t get a grade (other than “Completed”). It wasn’t an experiment. It doesn’t prove anything about language (other than English spelling is not easy). And it doesn’t really show anything (other than he’s now a much better speller!). So what does it all mean, then?
That’s easy. It means I love my grandson.
