At the beginning of the development of this area of linguistics, Ignace Gelb coined the term grammatology for this discipline;[1] later some scholars suggested calling it graphology[2] to match phonology, but that name is traditionally used for a pseudo-science.
Others therefore suggested renaming the study of language-dependent pronunciation phonemics or phonematics instead, but this did not gain widespread acceptance either, so the terms graphemics and graphematics became more frequent.
One major task is the descriptive analysis of implicit regularities in written words and texts (graphotactics) to formulate explicit rules (orthography) for the writing system that can be used in prescriptive education or in computer linguistics, e.g. for speech synthesis.
Different schools of thought consider different entities to be graphemes; major points of divergence are the handling of punctuation, diacritic marks, digraphs or other multigraphs and non-alphabetic scripts.
[5] In its broadest sense, some scholars also include the study of literacy in grammatology and, indeed, the impact of writing on philosophy, religion, science, administration and other aspects of the organization of society.
Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who is considered to be a key figure in structural approaches to language,[11] saw speech and writing as 'two distinct systems of signs' with the second having 'the sole purpose of representing the first.