In this article, we will discuss Phonemes and Morphemes.
What are Phonemes and Morphemes?
Phonemes
All languages are made of basic sounds called Phonemes. Adult human beings can produce approximately 100 phonemes. The English language is invented with about 45 phonemes. Languages differ in the number of phonemes, ranging from as few as 15 to as many as 85.
- Phonemes are the smallest distinct units in a language.
- In the English language, many consonants, like t, p, and m, corresponding to single phonemes. While other consonants, like c and g, can correspond to more than one phoneme.
- Vowels typically correspond to more friendliness. For example, o corresponds to different phonemes depending on whether it’s pronounced as in bone or woman.
- Some phonemes correspond to combinations of consonants, like ch, sh, and th.
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Morphemes
- Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units in a language.
- In the English language, only a few single letters, like I and a, are morphemes.
- Morphemes are basically whole words or meaningful parts of words, like prefixes, suffixes, and word stems. For example, the word “disliked” has three morphemes: “dis,” “lik,” and “ed.”
- The syntax is a system of rules that governs how words can be meaningfully arranged to form phrases and sentences. Example: One rule of syntax is that an article like “the” must come before a noun, not after: “Read the book,” not “Read book the.”
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