A one-letter word is a word composed of a single letter. The application of this apparently simple definition is complex, due to the difficulty of defining the notions of 'word' and 'letter'. One-letter words have an uncertain status in language theory, dictionaries and social usage. They are sometimes used as book titles, and have been the subject of literary experimentation by Futurist, Minimalist and Ulypian poets.
Meaningfulness as a concept Word For linguists, the term 'word' is far from unambiguous.(fr) Djamel Eddine Lachachi, "Problématique du mot comme unité linguistique", in Salah Mejri, Inès Sfar and Marc Van Campenhoudt, L'Unité en sciences du langage. Neuvièmes journées scientifiques du réseau thématique "Lexicologie, Terminologie, Traduction", Archives contemporaines, 2014 (read online). It is defined graphically(fr) . as a set of letters between two word dividers,.(fr) with Jacques Anis adding that "the word thus seems to have a real existence only in writing, through the blanks that isolate it."(fr) Jacques Anis, "Pour une graphématique autonome", Langue française, no 59, 1983 (DOI 10.3406/lfr.1983.5164). This pragmatic definition can already be found in Arnauld and Lancelot's Port-Royal Grammar, published in 1660: "We call a word what is pronounced apart and written apart.". In this sense, any isolated letter forms a word, even if it carries no meaning. Semantically, a word is defined as a morpheme, "the smallest unit of meaning."(de) Hans Glinz, "Grammatik und Sprache", in Hugo Moser, Das Ringen um eine neue deutsche Grammatik, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973, p. 79.. In this respect, an isolated letter is a word only if it carries meaning.
For Françoise Benzécri, the bijection seems obvious: "Every letter of an ordinary alphabet is associated with the one-letter word it constitutes, noted as that letter,"(fr) Françoise Benzécri, "Linguistique mathématique", Annales de l'Institut Henri-Poincaré, section B, no 1, 1967 (read online archive [PDF]). but Darryl Francis notes on the contrary that the meaning of one-letter words is not reduced to designating the letter that constitutes them.Darryl Francis, "One-Letter Words", Word Ways, 1972. Solange Cuénod also asserts that a one-letter word "has no reason to be taken as that letter,". and gives the following example:
Linguist Malgorzata Mandola doubts that a one-letter toponym can have semantic value in the case of the village of Y in the Somme,(fr) . and believes that it is rather what the grammarian Lucien Tesnière calls a "grammatical word, devoid of any semantic function".(fr) Marcel Proust, on the other hand, distinguishes between the nom propre (proper noun) and the mot commun (common noun), because for him, as Roland Barthes puts it, the mot commun is "a voluminous sign, a sign always full of a thick, dense layer of meaning, which no use reduces or flattens, unlike the nom commun:"(fr) Roland Barthes, "Proust et les noms", in Nouveaux Essais critiques, Le Seuil, 1972.
Letter
Letters are the elements of an alphabet, i.e. a writing system based on the representation of sounds, as opposed to ideograms, which are often the origin of images. From this perspective, it is atypical for a lone letter to convey anything beyond its literal meaning, whereas an ideogram may convey more than one concept simultaneously.(fr) Linda Koiran, "Jeux de mots et de regards croisés entre Orient et Occident", Trans, no 5, 2008 (read online). Linguists understand letters as graphemes, and classify them into three groups: alphabetic graphemes(fr) Jean-Christophe Pellat, "Indépendance ou interaction de l'écrit et de l'oral? Recensement critique des définitions du graphème", in Pour une théorie de la langue écrite, CNRS, 1988 (read online). or alphagrams, "punctuo-typographic graphemes" or "topograms", which correspond to punctuation marks, and "logographic graphemes" or logograms, which comprise "logograms stricto sensu, grapheme-signs noting word-morphemes (such as & and $) and quasi-logograms, such as acronyms, which turn a sequence of alphagrams into a global unit."(fr) Jacques Anis, "De certains marqueurs graphiques dans un modèle linguistique de l'écrit", DRLAV, no 41, 1989. The alphabetic grapheme is defined either as the representation of a phoneme, or as the minimal unit of the graphic form of the expression, the second definition, often preferred, assimilating the alphabetic grapheme to the letter as a component of the alphabet.
Several authors have pointed out that there can be no more one-letter words than there are letters in the alphabet,(fr) .(fr) such as Françoise Benzécri, for whom there are "as many one-letter words as there are letters." This apparently self-evident statement, however, does not take into account the impact of diacritical marks.T. A. Hall, " Not all one-letter words are palindromes ", Word Ways, vol. 44, no 4, 2011 (read online). In addition to the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, the French language uses 16 diacritical letters accepted by the civil registry: à, â, ä, ç, é, è, ê, ë, ï, î, ô, ö, ù, û, ü and ÿ.(fr) Carole Champalaune, "Circulaire du 23 juillet 2014 relative à l'état civil - NOR: JUSC1412888C", Bulletin officiel du ministère de la Justice et des libertés, nos 2014-07, July 31, 2014 (read online [PDF]). It is also customary to retain the original diacritics in the transcription of proper names written in Latin characters in the original language,(fr) D. Aïtoff, "De la transcription des noms géographiques", Annales de géographie, January 15, 1897 (JSTOR 23862565).. such as Å or Ø. These diacritical letters are considered unique graphemes.(fr) André Eskenazi, "Un ou deux graphèmes?", Linx, no 31, 1994 (read online). The same applies to graphemes resulting from elision: c', ç', d', j', l', m', n', s', t' and z'.(fr) Sanford A. Schane and Odette Filloux, "L'élision et la liaison en français", Langages, no. 8, 1967 (JSTOR 41680656).. The sixteenth-century typographical use of "q̃" for "que," notably by Joachim du Bellay(fr) . and Jean de Sponde,. could lead us to consider it a diacritical letter. But it is rather the transcription of an abbreviation from a Tironian note,(fr) .(fr) . conventionally rendered as "q'",(fr) . which is to be considered as a logogram,(fr) Nicolas Mazziotta, "Traiter les abréviations du français médiéval. Théorie de l'écriture et pratiques d'encodage", Corpus, no. 7, 2008 (read online). just like the "K with diagonal stroke," abbreviative of the Breton toponym Caer,(fr) H. d'Arbois de Jubainville. "Histoire de l'article dans le breton armoricain", Revue celtique, 1874, p. 214 (read online).(fr) Patrick Andries, "Entretien avec Ken Whistler, directeur technique du consortium Unicode", Document numérique, Lavoisier, vol. 6, no 3, 1 September 2002 (DOI 10.3166/dn.6.3-4.329-351) and transcribed as "k," which is officially considered as a "manifest alteration of the spelling."(fr) . Summary table of French one-letter wordsWithout diacriticABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZAcute accentÉCircumflexÂÊÎÔÛGrave accentÀÈÙApostropheC'D'J'L'M'N'S'T'Z'BarØCedillaÇCedilla and ApostropheÇ'OverringÅDiaeresis ÄËÏÖÜŸ
Uncertain status
In language theory
The existence of one-letter words goes against Platonic language theory, as letters are meant to be sublexical units,(fr) . intended to be combined with others to form words.Platon, Théétète 202b. As a result, Platonists developed a kind of aversion to single-letter words. Geber and the medieval Arab grammarians thus considered that a true word could not consist of less than two letters,.Dan Becker, "Linguistic Rules and Definitions in Ibn Janāḥ's 'Kitāb Al-Lumaʿ (Sefer Ha-Riqmah)' Copied from the Arab Grammarians)", The Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. 86, nos 3-4, 1996 (JSTOR 1454908). and Leibniz excluded one-letter words from meaningful combinations.(fr) M. Fichant, "L'origine de la négation", Les Études philosophiques, no 1, 1971 (JSTOR /20845923).
Reflections on the meaning and importance of one-letter words, however, return to a debate on which Plato took a stance in the Cratylus, and which Gérard Genette summarizes as follows:
While contemporary linguists most often agree with Ferdinand de Saussure that "the linguistic sign is arbitrary" and that this principle "is not contested by anyone,"(fr) Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, Payot, 1995 (read online), p. 100. this has not always been the case. The cratylic impulse has long haunted theories of language, leading to the attribution of mimetic meaning to letters in general, and to single-letter words in particular.
As Genette points out, this supposed mimesis is not only phonic, but sometimes graphic too:
For Court de Gébelin, a proponent of the existence of a mimetic mother tongue,. word "A" exemplifies a "primitive" word in the "plan général" of the Monde primitif published in 1773. The author provides the article "A" as an example of his project and explains its meaning as "designating property, possession".. Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre notes that this word, "in a very astonishing way installs the alphabet in myth".(fr) Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre, "Le Monde primitif de Court de Gébelin : poétique pour une science nouvelle", Le Genre humain, nos 45-46, 2006 (read online archive).
It should come as no surprise, for Gébelin:
According to Gébelin, all writing is "hieroglyphic," i.e. "made up of pure picto-ideograms." Consequently, "alphabetic writing is hieroglyphic [...], each letter being the painting of an object".. However, Genette notes that this does not imply the alphabet directly represents sounds.
Philologist Antoine Fabre d'Olivet, a contemporary of Gébelin and influenced by him,. believes that the one-letter word represents "a simple, non-compounded, non-complex thing, such as a single-stranded rope.".
In another register, the words of a letter can be a key to the analysis of a text or language. Edgar Allan Poe, in The Gold-Bug, as a prelude to the exposition of a method using frequency analysis,... underlines the status of the words of a letter as a cryptological key when the spacing of the original text is preserved, which is not the case for the cryptogram of his short story:.
It was thanks to such a word that Charles Virolleaud succeeded in 1929 in deciphering the Ugaritic alphabet,(fr) Charles Virolleaud, "Les inscriptions cunéiformes de Ras Shamra", Syria, vol. 10, nos 10-4, 1929 (read online).(fr) Charles Virolleaud, "Le déchiffrement des tablettes alphabétiques de Ras-Shamra", Syria, vol. 12, no 1, 1931 (DOI 10.3406/syria.1931.3530).Watson, Wilfred G. E. (1999). Handbook of Ugaritic Studies. Brill. p. 76. (the L in this alphabet) expressing the possessive preposition as in Hebrew and Arabic.(fr)
In dictionaries Due to the polysemy of one-letter words, crossword puzzles and dictionaries often do not include specific definitions.... Linguists Yannick Marchand and Robert Damper also note the absence of the word "A" from the lexical database they rely on, taken from an edition of Webster's English dictionary.Yannick Marchand et Robert I. Damper, "A Multistrategy Approach to Improving Pronunciation by Analogy", Computational Linguistics, vol. 26, no 2, 2000 (DOI 10.1162/089120100561674).. On the other hand, as T. A. Hall, the same work devotes different entries to "'D" (as in I'd) and "D'" (as in d'you know); to "'S" (as in he's) and "S'" (as in the girls' toys); to "'T" (as in 'twill do) and "T'" (as in t'other). This remark allows him to refute the regarded as minor by some authorsNorman Carey, "On a Class of Locally Symmetric Sequences", in Carlos Agon, Emmanuel Amiot, Moreno Andreatta, Gerard Assayag, Jean Bresson and John Manderau, Mathematics and Computation in Music, Springer, 2011 (read online archive), p. 51..that all one-letter words are palindromes: "these Webster entries are not palindromic, since reading from right to left does not produce the same word as reading from left to right".