graphemes don't inherently mean anything. the occasional phoneme might though. do animals that live their entire lives in the aphotic sea have an essentially different conceptualization of movement or motion from me? or on second thought, of 3-dimensional direction? or, for that matter, sensation? native spanish-speaking grade-school kids struggle with english because the graphemes and phonemes don't correspond one-to-one like they do in spanish. explain why the ending of "canoe" sounds just like "zoo" but different from "toe." none of this is a problem, of course. the aphotic sea creature might not be aware that it is in a medium. but then how aware of air are people? it must be the same. wind and current, particulate matter and scent. there's no concept of alphabetization in chinese. chinese characters are grouped by their primary stroke and ordered within that group by number of brushstrokes. abyssal plains are incredibly level and monochromatic, although there's a lot of garbage down there, bottles and plastic objects. we put larger spaces between words than between letters so that you can differentiate which groups of letters comprise words and differentiate each word discretely from the others in a text. if the letters all touched then wouldn't that make all english words graphemes? how long would it take for people to forget the idea of letters? it's infuriating that the anglerfish is called that, that so many of the animals were given names that relate their behavior or characteristics to those of humans, and so many of these names simply are inaccurate. if from now on i spelled "differentiate" with a starting s instead of a starting d, people would probably be thrown for maybe a second or two but then just assume i had made an error and disregard it. but how many of this class of intentional errors could communication endure? supposedly every sixth word can be removed from a text and the meaning remains as gettable as if the text was intact. if you really wanted a complete taxonomy of the animal kingdom, every individual creature would be identified as such. but we're comfortable enough with species for now. why do the faces of born-blind people look so different from those of us who are sighted? what am i contributing to evolution? why did paul celan wait? what did my looking so closely at the evening thunderstorm clouds contribute to evolution? why have written language at all, doesn't it just isolate us from each other? the chickadee is named after an approximate conversion of the sound of its call into english, although birds routinely add two or more "dee"s to their calls and i've heard individual birds drop the middle a entirely. but the birds are undaunted.