Mytheme

In structuralism-influenced studies of mythology, a mytheme is a fundamental generic unit of narrative structure (typically involving a relationship between a character, an event, and a theme) from which myths are thought to be constructed^[1]^[2]—a minimal unit that is always found shared with other, related mythemes^{[citation needed]} and reassembled in various ways ("bundled")^[3] or linked in more complicated relationships. For example, the myths of Greek Adonis and Egyptian Osiris share several elements, leading some scholars to conclude that they share a source, i.e. images passed down in cultures or from one to another, being ascribed new interpretations of the action depicted, as well as new names in various readings of icons.

^ "mytheme – Definition of mytheme in English by Oxford Dictionaries". Oxford Dictionaries – English. Archived from the original on April 25, 2017.
^ Similarly, in memetics a meme is the smallest memetic unit that has semantic meaning and in a language or dialect, a phoneme (from the Greek: φώνημα, phōnēma, "a sound uttered") is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances.
^ Lévi-Strauss: "the true constituent units of a myth are not the isolated relations but bundles of such relations" (Lévi-Strauss 1963:211).

[1] "mytheme – Definition of mytheme in English by Oxford Dictionaries". Oxford Dictionaries – English. Archived from the original on April 25, 2017.

[2] Similarly, in memetics a meme is the smallest memetic unit that has semantic meaning and in a language or dialect, a phoneme (from the Greek: φώνημα, phōnēma, "a sound uttered") is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances.

[3] Lévi-Strauss: "the true constituent units of a myth are not the isolated relations but bundles of such relations" (Lévi-Strauss 1963:211).

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