Morpheme

Phonetics is the study of the sounds of language. The important or critical sounds of a language are called phonemes.

Once we have identified phonemes the next step is to put sounds together into meaningful units.

A unit of meaning is called morpheme, and it may include one phoneme or several.

It may also include such things as pitch and tone, which can change the meaning of a sound - every child knows from the tone of his or her mother’s voice whether she is angry or happy.

A morpheme then is a meaningful unit of sound or sounds in a particular language.

Must remember that language is a form of symbolic communication and that the meaning of the sounds in a language are arbitrary, being what ever the people who speak them agreed upon.

We say water while the French say eau (pronounced “oh”) and the Spanish say agua. All three words mean the same thing because the people who use them agreed that they do.

Morphemes should not be thought of in terms of written words; they are more than just the sounds those words represent.

There are morphemes in languages for which there is no writing. And some morphemes can have several forms, both writing and spoken.
Morpheme