Spelfabet

A morpheme is a meaningful word part. Many morphemes have spellings which stay the same even when their pronunciation changes. For example, we write ‘-ed’ at the end of regular past tense verbs, as in ‘jumped’, ‘filled’ and ‘landed’, even though we pronounce it three different ways (see this video for why).

Morphemes can be either bound or free:

Bound morphemes:

• Prefixes, added to word beginnings to change their meaning, e.g. the ‘dis’ in ‘disable’.

• Suffixes, added to the end of a word. English has two kinds of suffixes:
  • Inflectional suffixes, which are part of the grammar of English. There are eight of them: plural (e.g. cat-cats, dog-dogs, fox-foxes), possessive (e.g. Renee‘s hat, the princesses‘ tiaras), comparative (hot-hotter), superlative (hot-hottest), third person singular (he jumps, it washes), past tense (tucked, hummed, landed), present participle (sing-singing) and past participle (has/have tucked, taken) suffixes.
  • Derivational suffixes, which change the meaning or class of a word, e.g. add “less” to a word to add the meaning “without” (e.g. friendless), or add “ly” to make it an adverb (e.g. friendly). Most suffixes fall into this category.

• Word roots: These are word parts from the source languages of English which aren’t words in Modern English, but still carry meaning, e.g. Latin ‘ruptus’ meaning ‘break’ is the root of English words like ‘disrupt’, ‘erupt’, ‘interrupt’ and ‘rupture’. If you take off all the prefixes and suffixes, and what’s left is not an English word, it’s a word root. Sometimes two or more word roots can combine e.g. ‘auto’ meaning ‘self’, ‘bio’ meaning ‘life’ and ‘graph’ meaning ‘write’ are combined in the word ‘autobiography’. To make them sound exciting, I like to tell kids that word roots are like fossils from ancient languages we can still find in the words we use today.

• Officially English does not have Infixes, which are inserted into words, apart from joke words/slang like “edumacation” and “abso******lutely”.

Free morphemes:

• Content words: Most words – nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs – are content words. Prefixes and suffixes can be added to these types of words.
  
• Function words: These are grammatical words used to create meaningful sentences, but they don’t mean much by themselves, so are hard to define. They include determiners, conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, modals, qualifiers and question words. There are relatively few function words in English, but we use them a lot. It is not possible to make up new ones.

Two other terms you might hear about morphemes are ‘base‘ and ‘stem‘. A base is the main meaningful part of a word, and we add prefixes and suffixes to it to create word families like ‘ease-easy-easier-easiest-easily-unease-uneasy-easiness-uneasiness…’. A stem is probably going too deep into fine linguistics distinctions to worry much about here, it’s a word root to which inflectional suffixes are added (I think! But definitions vary).

Can we make up new morphemes?

We can’t make up new inflectional suffixes or function words, but we can make up new content words, prefixes and derivational suffixes.

Often new words are coined by combining word bits e.g. “smog” is a portmanteau of “smoke” and “fog”, and the initials of Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus have become the word “scuba”. The 2019 Australian Macquarie Dictionary Word of the Year was “robodebt”, after our government issued thousands of incorrect automated welfare debts, and hounded poor people to pay them. We also give existing words new meanings (“I’ll friend you”) and borrow words from other languages (e.g. “yo-yo” from Ilocano, “moccasin” from Algonquian, “banjo” from Bantu). To read more about how English gets new words, try this delightful Guardian article.

New derivational suffixes can also be made up, as happened after the Watergate scandal, giving us new words with the suffix “gate” like “Irangate”, “choppergate” and (ehem) “nipplegate”. I’m not sure whether “Mc” as in “McJobs” and “McMansion” is officially an English prefix for anything other than Gaelic names.

Double/drop/swap before a suffix

Before adding a suffix to some base words, you have to meddle with their endings:

Double: In words like “big”, “hot”, “red” and “kneecap”, with one “short”, one-letter vowel then a one-letter consonant at the end, double the last consonant before adding a vowel suffix. This shows that the last vowel in the base word is a “short” vowel, as in “bigger”, “hottest”, “redden” and “kneecapping” (not “biger”, “hotest”, “reden” and “kneecaping”). Note that when the last vowel/syllable is unstressed (i.e. it’s a schwa not a “short” vowel), you don’t double the last consonant e.g. happening (not “happenning”), “listener” (not “listenner”), “visited” (not visitted).

Drop: words ending with a letter “e”, such as “make”, “like”, “simple” and “cheese”, lose that “e” before a vowel suffix, to yield words like “making”, “likeable, “simplify” and “cheesy”. However, some words need to keep the letter “e” for another reason, for example in words like “trace”, when adding a suffix like “able”, the “e” is kept to show how to pronounce the letter “c” (“traceable” not “tracable”).

Swap: words ending with a letter y (but not ay, ey or oy) usually change it to i before adding suffixes, unless that would mean two letter i’s in a row e.g. cry-cried, baby-babies, happy-happiness, merry-merriment, marry-marriage, fry-frying, baby-babyish.

What is an allomorph?

If you read this and related blogs, you probably know about allophones, which are different pronunciations of a phoneme. For example, think about how each /t/ sound is produced when you say the word “titillate”. The first one has more of an airburst, the second one is more like a /d/ and the last one may just involve putting your tongue in the /t/ position and leaving it there. Yet we think of all three as the same phoneme, because a phoneme is a concept.

Similarly, morphemes can sound and/or look different in different words. The plural morpheme in “cats” is produced as a voiceless /s/ sound, because the last sound in “cat” (/t/) is voiceless. In “dogs” the plural morpheme is voiced as /z/ because the last sound in “dog” (/g/) is voiced. When a word ends with an /s/ or a similar friction sound, like /z/, /sh/ or /ch/, the plural morpheme is kept separate from these similar sounds with a vowel, giving us “es” plurals like “buses“, “boxes“, “quizzes“, “dishes” and “benches“. This gives us three main allomorphs of the plural morpheme, but English also has irregular plural morphemes like the “ren” in “children” and “oxen” (from Old English), the “x” in “plateaux” and “bureaux” (from French) and the “i” and “e” in “cacti” and “algae” (from Latin).

Similarly, we have three allomorphs of the regular past tense “ed” morpheme, as in “jumped” (pronounced as /t/ after a voiceless sound), “fanned” (pronounced as /d/ after a voiced sound that’s not produced like /d/) and “wanted” and “handed” (pronounced with a vowel separating the morpheme from the base word’s final /t/ or /d/, so that we can hear the morpheme).

Many base words and word roots have allomorphs too, for example the word “leaf” becomes “leav” in the plural “leaves”, and the . The Latin root “ann” meaning “year” is part of English words like “annual”, anniversary” and “superannuation”, and has the allomorph “en(n)” in words like “centenary”, “bicentennial” and “millennium”.

What is a chameleon prefix?

Because sounds run together when we speak, some prefixes change their last sound to more closely match the first sound of the word or word root they join. This can also change the spelling.

For example, when ‘in’ meaning ‘not’ is attached to a word starting with /p/, /b/ or /m/ (lips together) at the start, it changes to ‘im’ as in ‘impossible’, ‘imbalance’, ‘immature’. If attached to a word starting with /l/, it changes to ‘il’ as in ‘illegal’, and if attached to a word starting with /r/ it changes to ‘ir’ as in ‘irresponsible’. If attached to a word starting with /k/ or /g/, the pronunciation changes to ‘ing’ but the spelling doesn’t change, as in ‘incomprehensible’ and ‘ingratitude’. It’s the same spelling as /ng/ as in “pink”.

Not just small words inside big words

Many of my clients have been taught to look for little words inside big words. Budding Shirley-Sharpeyes sometimes comment they can see the word “put” in the word “computer”, “dance” in “guidance”, and that “together” contains the words “to”, “get” and “her”. However, this is not helping them with meaning. “Guide” is the base word in “guidance”, not “dance”. The word “together” doesn’t mean “to get her”.

When children are taught to think about small words from which longer words might be built, and successfully identify base words, brilliant. They’ll notice the “comfort” in “discomfort”, the “patient” in “impatiently” and the “forget” in “unforgettable”. They’ll be able to use this knowledge to understand and remember these and other words with the same bases, like “comforting”, “patiently” and “forgetful”. They’ll be able to add thousands of new words to their vocabularies.

When teachers are properly taught how our words are built, it will be realistic to expect them to share this knowledge with children. One cannot give what one does not have.