One-letter word
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. It is defined graphically as a set of letters between two word dividers, with Jacques Anis adding that "the word thus seems to have a real existence only in writing, through the blanks that isolate it." 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." In this respect, an isolated letter is a word only if it carries meaning.File:A dans l'ABC de Ratisbonne.jpeg|alt=Page d'abécédaire illustré|thumb|A in A. B. C. Trim, enchanted alphabet by Louis Ratisbonne illustrated by Bertall
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," but Darryl Francis notes on the contrary that the meaning of one-letter words is not reduced to designating the letter that constitutes them. 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, and believes that it is rather what the grammarian Lucien Tesnière calls a "grammatical word, devoid of any semantic function". Marcel Proust, on the other hand, distinguishes between the nom propre and the mot commun, 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:"
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. Linguists understand letters as graphemes, and classify them into three groups: alphabetic graphemes 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 and quasi-logograms, such as acronyms, which turn a sequence of alphagrams into a global unit." 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, 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. 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. It is also customary to retain the original diacritics in the transcription of proper names written in Latin characters in the original language, such as Å or Ø. These diacritical letters are considered unique graphemes. The same applies to graphemes resulting from elision: c', ç', d', j', l', m', n', s', t' and z'. The sixteenth-century typographical use of "q̃" for "que," notably by Joachim du Bellay 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, conventionally rendered as "q'", which is to be considered as a logogram, just like the "K with diagonal stroke," abbreviative of the Breton toponym Caer, and transcribed as "k," which is officially considered as a "manifest alteration of the spelling."
Uncertain status
In language theory
The existence of one-letter words goes against Platonic language theory, as letters are meant to be sublexical units, intended to be combined with others to form words. 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, and Leibniz excluded one-letter words from meaningful combinations.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," 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".
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."
File:Gold Bug cryptogram.jpg|alt=Facsimilé de cryptogramme|thumb|The Gold-Bug cryptogram, which has no spaces
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, expressing the possessive preposition as in Hebrew and Arabic.
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. On the other hand, as T. A. Hall, the same work devotes different entries to "'D" and "D'" ; to "'S" and "S'" ; to "'T" and "T'". This remark allows him to refute the regarded as minor by some authorsthat 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".Craig Conley has devoted a 232-page reference book to one-letter words, One-Letter Words: a Dictionary, in which he counts over a thousand different meanings for English one-letter words, which leads him to emphasize the importance of context in understanding these words. For example, he lists 76 meanings of the word "X", to which he says he has a particular affection, including 17 in the "texts and proverbs" section, three in the "cards, spirits, and adult films" section, eight in the "on parchment paper" section, 15 in the "crosswords" section, five in the "Dr/Mr/Mrs/Miss X" section, 11 in the "scientific subjects" section, eight in the "mathematics" section, three in the "foreign meanings" section, eight in the "miscellaneous" section, and two in the "facts and figures" section. According to him, the only other work on the subject is a dictionary of one-letter words in Pali, compiled by the sixteenth-century Buddhist lexicographer Saddhammakitti and entitled Ekakkharakosa.
English lexicographer Jonathon Green, a specialist in the English slang language, has compiled a large number of one-letter word meanings in English, most of which do not appear in Conley's dictionary. The following table compares the number of meanings given to English one-letter words by these two lexicographers.
The incipit of Craig Conley's dictionary is the reminder of the White Queen's words to Alice:
This evocation of Lewis Carroll's text is all the more appropriate to the challenge of a dictionary of the words of a letter, since the description of the meaning of these words must include meanings that are not only nominative, i.e. relative to the use of language in general, but also stipulative, i.e. decided by an author in a particular context, as Humpty-Dumpty emphasizes to Alice: