Creating Morphology: a basic look at things

Morphology is the study of how words are formed and change in accordance with the grammar of the language. The relationship, say, between the singular and plural

tree → trees

is a morphological one, in that tree is changed to become trees by adding an -s at the end. Similarly, a verb can add the suffix -ed to form the simple past tense. E.g.

work → worked

And this as well is something that Morphology is concerned with.

Morphology is an easy place to start working on your new language. Whatever type of language you want to create, it's useful to look at how natural existing languages go about changing their words. Let's take the made up word baba for example.

Suffixation (adding something at the end):

Like for English plurals, we can add something at the end of the word. Say, -t.

baba → baba-t

Examples of this are very common in a variety of languages. E.g.

(Spanish) casa (house) → cas-ita (small house)

(German) jeder (every) → jede-m (to every)

(French) acheter (buy) → achet-on (we buy)

(Napolitan vernacular) mamme (mum) → mamme-ta (your mum)

Prefixation (adding something before the word):

Like English un- for negation (e.g. decided → undecided).

baba → t-baba

Examples from other languages include:

(Arabic) salam (peace) → as-salam (the peace)

(Swahili) mtoto (child) → wa-toto (children)

Infixation (adding something inside the word):

baba → ba-t-ba

This is not very common in English. One example may be the emphatic:

unbelievable→ un-bloody-believable

Examples from other languages include:

(Swahili) kupeleka (send) → ku-to-peleka (not send)

Modification (changing one sound for another):

baba → t-aba / ba-t-a / bab-t

Modification can occur at any point of the word, beginning middle or end. Modification often happens in the formation of the simple past tense in English of some of the so-called irregular verbs (e.g. take → took).

(Bergamasque vernacular) dispet (prank) → dispecc (pranks)

(Latin) vinco (I win) → vic-t-us (won, past participle)

There are other ways in which Morphology can operate, but these are the basic ones that will get you started. Often you will find more than one of these phenomena taking place, for example in the formation of the past participle in German:

lieben (love) → ge-lieb-t (loved)

Finally, remember that these changes can carry any type of meaning. As we have seen you can negate something or make it plural, you could make it small or big, definite or indefinite, present past or future. The possibilities are endless! Start easy with some basic stuff to get the hang of it, but be ready to experiment and be on the lookout for interesting uses in other languages.

Here's one of my favourite ones. In Latin there are some verbs that morphologically distinguish an action that is happening from an action that is just beginning. E.g.

rubeo (I am red) → rub-esc-o (I am becoming red/blushing)