Most
wonderful of all are words, and how they make friend one with another. (O.
Henry)
Words
may be related to each other in a special way. Consider the words below, which
are all related in both sound and meaning. (You may know the meaning of some of
them but you will when you finish this book)
Phonetician,phonetics,phonology
Phonological,phonic,phoneme,phonemic
Telephone,telephonic,euphonious,symphony
Phon
is a minimal form in that it can’t be divided into more elemental structures.
Ph does not mean anything, pho has no relation in meaning to the word foe
though it may be pronounced like it, and on is not the preposition as in ‘on
the table’. All the words on the list, however, contain phon as part of their
structure. Even if that part of the word is pronounced differently in the words
above, the same element phon is present, with its identical meaning,
‘pertaining to sound’, in all these words.
Notice
further that is the following pairs of words the meanings of all the words in
column B consist of the meanings of the words in column A plus the meaning
‘not’ :
A.
desirable, likely,inspired,happy,developed,sophisticated
B.
undesirable,unlikely,uninspired,unhappy,undeveloped,unsophisticated
The
Macquarie Dictionary lists about 1800 adjectives beginning with un-, the
meaning of which speakers of English would know if they know the word without
the un-
If
the most elemental units of meaning, the basic linguistic signs, are assumed to
be the words of a language, it would be coincidence that un- has the same meaning
in all the column B words above, or that phon has the same meaning in all the
words in the preceding list. Obviously, it is no coincidence. The words
undesirable, unlikely, uninspired, unhappy, and the other in column B consist
of at least two meaningful unit: un+desirable, un+likely, and so on.
It
is also a fact about words that their internal structure is subject to rules.
Thus uneaten, unadmired and un grammatical are words in English, but *eatenun,
admirednun, and grammaticalnun (to mean ‘non eaten’, ‘not admired’, ‘not
grammatical’) are not, because we do not form a negative meaning of a word by
suffixing un (adding it to the end of the word), but by prefixing it (adding it
to the beginning).
The
study of the internal structure of words, and of the rules by which words
performed, is called morphology. Knowledge of a language implies knowledge its
morphology.
