Basic units

Morpheme:

The smallest meaningful unit in a language that cannot be further subdivided. May be a word, may not be a word on its own. The English –(e)s is an example of a morpheme that cannot stand alone. For an example, the word “unflappability” is made up of the morphemes “un-” (), “flap” (), “-able” (in this case a ) and “-ity” (always a suffix).

Root, radical:

The core of a word that cannot be further reduced into meaningful units (i. e. morphemes). Root or root word is also used to denote the base of another word that is from the root in some way.

Affix:

Any that cannot stand on its own and is in some way attached to another morpheme

Affigation:

The action of putting an affix on a word

Prefix:

Any that cannot stand on its own and is put in front of another morpheme

Prefigation:

The action of putting a prefix on a word

Suffix:

Any that cannot stand on its own and is put behind another morpheme

Suffigation:

The action of putting a suffix on a word

Word formation:

Morphological typology: Classing languages by their morphology

Agglutination, agglutinative:

Languages that stick (“glue”) morphemes together. Klingon is described as agglutinative due to the way words and sentences are formed by adding prefixes and suffixes to existing words. Terran agglutinative languages are, f. ex., Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish and the majority of North American languages.

Fusion, fusional:

In contrast to languages, fusional languages can use a single to express multiple , or features. For example, the Spanish verb ending “-ábamos” stands for the first person , something an agglutinative language could theoretically need up to five distinct to express (one each for first , plural, past , imperfective and indicative mood). In addition, endings tend to “fuse” to root words, modifying both. In the above example of “unflappability”, the fact that the word is not *unflapableity is an example of fusion. Languages tend to be mostly fusional or agglutinative, but there are exceptions, f. ex. the Siouan languages.

Synthesis, synthetic:

Languages that modify root words through or to denote or relations between them. All of the above are types of synthetic languages. Contrasts with analytic languages (see below).

Polysynthesis, polysynthetic:

Highly synthetic languages, in which many/most words are made up from a high number of morphemes. In the “extreme” version, certain words are built only from non-independent ; f. ex. in the Cherokee language, verb roots require at minimum a (comparable to those in Klingon), an and a modal suffix (describes a mixture of categories) to form a complete verb; a verbal root alone is not an independent word. There is no minimal word-to-morpheme-ratio for a language to be considered polysynthetic, therefore you might hear a language called “mildly polysynthetic”. That also means that it would not necessarily be false to describe Klingon as (mildly) polysynthetic, but it is also not very common.

Analytic:

Languages that use words to denote or relations between words as opposed to or forms. They usually assign syntactic primarily by word order. Contrasts with “synthetic”. No language is purely analytic or synthetic, so even a mostly synthetic language such as Klingon can have analytic constructions and vice versa. In English, the of can be either synthetic (“commoner”) or analytic (“more common”).

Isolating:

The “extreme” version of an analytic language with no or extremely few forms. Whether a true isolating language exists is a topic of contention among linguists, but Mandarin Chinese is usually advanced as the most isolating language on Earth.

Morphological process types: In what ways languages form words

Derivation:

Forming a new word from an existing one by adding . Affixes that are used for this can be referred to as “derivational affixes”. English examples include -ness (f. ex. “slowness”) or en-/em- (f. ex. “enlarge” or “embolden”). In common parlance, any way of forming new words from an existing one may be called derivation, but this use is considered imprecise. Note that morphemes (such as the English -s) are not a case of derivation, as the result is a form of the original word, not a new word.

Inflection:

General term for words changing from their “dictionary form”, depending on their usage in a sentence. The term “inflection” is mostly used with languages, like most Indo-European languages. It is therefore debatable whether Klingon can/should be considered a type of inflection.

Productivity, productive:

The degree to which a grammatical process is used by speakers, especially when introducing new words to the language. For example, newly formed words in English will use the past tense ending “-ed” rather than a past tense formation following the pattern of “sing-sang-sung”; i. e. if one were to invent the verb “to kling” (meaning “to speak Klingon”) the past tense would be “klinged”, never “klang”. In Klingon, the noun-noun construction as well as purpose clause nouns may be considered productive types of word formation. However, as speakers mostly impose this restriction upon themselves, it is an atypical example.

Lexicalisation:

The process of adding words to a language, particularly the process in which a newly-formed word loses the association with its origin and starts to designate only a particular meaning. A Klingon example is the word neb in the sense of “nozzle”. The older meaning is “beak, bill”, so the word should take the -Du for body parts, but because the sense of “nozzle” has become fully lexicalised, it instead takes the general plural suffix -mey. In English, generalised brand names like “hoover” or “xerox” used as verbs are an example, as speakers who use these words may no longer be aware that these words used to be brand names.

Compounding, compound, compound word:

A word made up from more than one . In Klingon, compound or compound noun is used to denote a word that seems to consist of two words written as one, such as jolpa “transporter room”, seemingly composed of jol “transport” and pa “room”. It is not recommended that Klingonists form these words themselves.

Loanword, loan:

A word that is taken from another language, usually with the same or a closely related meaning and adjusted pronunciation. The process of taking a word from another language is called “borrowing”. Names for Terran countries in Klingon are loanwords.

Calque:

Also called “loan translation” in which a word is taken from another language and translated piece-by-piece into the target language. For example, the above “loanword” is a calque from German “Lehnwort” (from “(ent)lehnen” - loan and “Wort” - word). The word “calque”, on the other hand, is a loanword (from French).

Other

Hindsight word:

Community term describing a composite or derived word of any kind whose meaning only becomes clear in hindsight, i. e. after it has been translated. Has occasionally been applied to canon words, such as toy’wI’a which could just as easily be understood to mean “head servant” as opposed to “a more intense kind of servant” (toy’wI – servant+-’a augmentative \(\rightarrow\) toy’wI’a – slave), but is usually used for words coined by a member of the community. A common example was QoQ DoS, lit: “music target”, a term that makes perfect sense for “drum”, only after one knows that “drum” is its intended meaning (and is no longer used, as it has been replaced by canon words).

Fossil word, fossil form:

A word or form of a word that is largely obsolete except for the usage in a particular or phrases. An example would be the English word “ado”, not used outside of expressions like “without further ado” or “much ado about nothing”. In Klingon, we find a fossil in f. ex. SIS yoD (umbrella), in which SIS, normally a verb meaning “to rain”, is the only remaining usage of a formerly existing noun “rain”.