Morphology

In many languages, which appear to be single forms actually turn out to contain a large number of word-like elements.  For example, in Swahili (spoken throughout East Africa), the form  Nitakupenda conveys what, in English, would have to be represented as something like I will love you.  Now, is the Swahili form a single word? If it is a word then it seems to consist of a number of elements which, in English, turn up as separate words.  A very rough correspondence can be presented in the following way:

Ni – ta         -ku        -penda

‘I’     ‘will’      ‘you’       ‘love’

It seems as if this Swahili ‘word’ is rather different from what we think of as an English ‘word’.  Yet, there clearly is some similarity between the languages, in that similar elements of the whole message can be found in both.  Perhaps a better way of looking at linguistic forms in different languages would be to use this notion of ‘elements’ in the message, rather than to depend on identifying ‘words’.  The type of exercise we have just performed is an example of investigating forms in language, generally known as morphology

This term,which literally means ‘the study of forms’, was originally used in biology, but, since the mid nine-teenth century, has also been used to describe that type of investigation which analyzes all those basic ‘elements’ which are used in a language.  What we have been describing as ‘elements’ in the form of a linguistic message are more technically known as morphemes.