Words

Chapter 3 showed how sounds are organised into patterns. Sounds themselves carry no meaning, but the units built from them do. This chapter looks at morphology, the study of how words are built from smaller meaningful pieces. It is the area where languages differ most visibly. English says in my houses with four separate words; Hungarian says házaimban with one. Esperanto deliberately builds thousands of words from a few hundred roots. Understanding how words are put together gives you a way to read a long unfamiliar word instead of memorising it.

Morphemes: The Smallest Units of Meaning

A morpheme is the smallest unit of a language that carries meaning or grammatical function. It is not the same as a syllable (a syllable is a unit of sound) and not always the same as a word. The English word unhappiness has three morphemes, un- (not), happy and -ness (state of being), while dogs has two: dog and the plural -s.

Morphemes come in two broad kinds. A free morpheme can stand alone as a word (cat, happy). A bound morpheme cannot: it must attach to something else (un-, -ness, -s). The core of a word, which carries its main meaning, is its root. Bound morphemes attached to a root are affixes, and they come in several kinds:

Inflection and Derivation

Affixes do two quite different jobs, and linguists keep them apart.

Inflection adds grammatical information without creating a new word in the dictionary sense: walk, walks, walked, walking are all forms of the same word, and each stays a verb. English has only eight inflectional suffixes (plural -s, possessive -'s, third-person -s, past -ed, -ing, past participle -en/-ed, comparative -er, superlative -est). Languages with rich inflection, such as Hungarian and Latin, have many more.

Derivation creates a new word, often of a different class: teach (verb) → teacher (noun), happy (adjective) → happiness (noun), quick (adjective) → quickly (adverb). The meaning changes, and the word usually gets its own dictionary entry.

Notice the order in the last-but-one row: derivation comes first and inflection last. You can have teach-er-s, but not *teach-s-er in the same sense. This is a general tendency across languages.

Compounds

A compound joins two or more roots into one word: blackboard, laptop, toothbrush. The result is usually a special kind of its second part: a blackboard is a kind of board, a toothbrush a kind of brush. The second element is the head, and the first element modifies it. Compounds are an especially common way of making words in German, Hungarian and Esperanto.

The two railway words are almost identical in structure ("iron road"), which shows how often different languages build the same idea from the same parts. (Hungarian and Esperanto are unrelated; the similarity comes from the same way of naming a new thing.)

Allomorphs

Just as a phoneme can have several pronunciations (allophones, Chapter 3), a morpheme can have several forms, called allomorphs. The English plural -s is a single morpheme but surfaces as [s] in cats, [z] in dogs and [ɪz] in buses, the pattern you saw in Chapter 3. The past-tense -ed behaves the same way: [t] in walked, [d] in played, [ɪd] in wanted.

Hungarian offers an even clearer case. The suffix meaning "in" has two forms, chosen by the vowels of the word it attaches to, a pattern called vowel harmony:

Some words have irregular forms that cannot be explained by sound rules: go and went, or mouse and mice. These are a different form of the same morpheme, learned individually. A few forms add nothing at all: sheep is both singular and plural.

Word Types Across Languages

Languages can be roughly sorted by how much they pack into a word. The sorting is a spectrum, and most languages mix types, but it is useful as a map.

Agglutinative: One Meaning per Piece

In each example every piece has one clear meaning, and the pieces are simply lined up. The Esperanto word malsanulejo shows five morphemes, and a reader who knows the pieces can work out the meaning ("a place for unhealthy people") without having seen the word before. That is the idea behind Esperanto's word-building, which you can see in action in Esperanto Grammar 1, Chapter 5.

Fusional: Many Meanings in One Ending

In Latin amō ("I love") the single ending -ō tells you the person (first), the number (singular), the tense (present), the mood (indicative) and the voice (active), all fused together. You cannot cut it into five pieces. German and French also fuse: the German ending -e in die große Frau carries case, number and gender at the same time.

Isolating and Polysynthetic: The Extremes

Mandarin comes close to the isolating end, where a verb does not change for tense or person and grammar is carried by word order and particles. At the other extreme, polysynthetic languages such as Inuktitut can build words that correspond to a whole English sentence. English sits near the middle, with a little inflection and a lot of compounding.

Hands-On Exercises