Fun With Morphemes

The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature."
-Jorge Luis Borges, Prologue to "El otro, el mismo"

As Eddie mentioned in his blog last Friday, English is a pretty complicated language with a long history. It is an elaborate fusion of many different languages like French, Latin, and Greek as well as words that are "Germanic" in origin, which includes words native to English because they were inherited from Old English. We use the expression "borrowed" words to refer to a word that has been derived from a language that is not Germanic, and this type actually makes up a significant portion of words that are used in English today.


Just how many words are there in English? Well, it's an interesting question. The vocabulary of English is by far the largest of any language in the world. New versions of English dictionaries can contain over half a million words, and this doesn't even include specialized words or technical terms (like medical words) and neither does it include new words, slang or even singular/plural forms and tenses. Thus, in total, the word count of the English language could be considered to be far more than a million.


The English vocabulary hasn't always been this sizeable, though. One of the interesting aspects of our language is not only the method in which new words are acquired, but also the way they are treated once introduced into the vernacular. Often when new vocabulary is added to a language, older native words with similar meanings can fall into disuse. In the history of English, though, when a new word was added it was simply given a slightly different nuance than the native word, or it was used in a different context. This accounts for why we have so many synonyms and ways of expression.


In the Battle of Hastings in 1066, for example, the Saxons (speakers of the Germanic language) were defeated by the Normans (French speakers). Therefore, after this time those who gained control of the country were native speakers of a different language than that of the laity, or common people. It makes sense, then, that the language of those who governed would have some influence over the way people in the land communicated with each other. This societal arrangement paved the way for many French and Latin words and word parts (called 'morphemes') to be introduced into English.


Believe it or not, these morphemes can actually be helpful when it comes to learning new vocabulary in English. For example, while the actual number of words in the English language can seem rather daunting to anybody who is studying English vocabulary, we don't have to memorize each individual word but instead can learn a smaller number of basic morphemes, and then learn how to interpret them when we encounter new vocabulary. At first this can be confusing, but after a while the benefits of this type of knowledge will be noticeable.


I will talk about this more in my next entry (Nov. 21st), but for now let me start with a couple of quick examples to introduce you to the use of morphemes. We'll use some of Eddie's vocabulary from last week as our example:
• Transport: To move something from one place to another
This word contains two morphemes: trans, meaning "across", and port, meaning "carry." We can see these same morphemes in other English words like "transaction" and "portable."

• Bilingual: The ability to speak two languages
There are three morphemes in this word: bi, meaning "two", lingu, meaning "language/tongue," and -al, which is a suffix indicating that a word is an adjective. (We'll talk about suffixes more specifically next time as well.) These morphemes can be seen in words like "bisect" and "linguistics."

As you can see, by parsing (or "breaking down") these words, it is easy to notice how the individual morphemes relate to the meaning of the word as a whole. In future postings, we'll take a more detailed look at this technique and also have more morphemes to study, but in the meantime, try to see if you can find the morphemes listed above in other English words.


Until next time!

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