Word stemIn linguistics, a word stem is a part of a word responsible for its lexical meaning. Typically, a stem remains unmodified during inflection with few exceptions due to apophony (for example in Polish, miast-o ("city") and w mieść-e ("in the city"); in English, sing, sang, and sung, where it can be modified according to morphological rules or peculiarities, such as sandhi) Uncovering and analyzing cognation between word stems and roots within and across languages has allowed comparative philology and comparative linguistics to determine the history of languages and language families.
Function wordIn linguistics, function words (also called functors) are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. They signal the structural relationships that words have to one another and are the glue that holds sentences together. Thus they form important elements in the structures of sentences.
InterjectionAn interjection is a word or expression that occurs as an utterance on its own and expresses a spontaneous feeling or reaction. It is a diverse category, encompassing many different parts of speech, such as exclamations (ouch!, wow!), curses (damn!), greetings (hey, bye), response particles (okay, oh!, m-hm, huh?), hesitation markers (uh, er, um), and other words (stop, cool). Due to its diverse nature, the category of interjections partly overlaps with a few other categories like profanities, discourse markers, and fillers.
Finnish languageFinnish (endonym: suomi ˈsuo̯mi or suomen kieli ˈsuo̯meŋ ˈkie̯li) is a Uralic language of the Finnic branch, spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside of Finland. Finnish is one of the two official languages of Finland (the other being Swedish). In Sweden, both Finnish and Meänkieli (which has significant mutual intelligibility with Finnish) are official minority languages. The Kven language, which like Meänkieli is mutually intelligible with Finnish, is spoken in the Norwegian county Troms og Finnmark by a minority group of Finnish descent.
Proper nounA proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity (Africa, Jupiter, Sarah, Tesla, Inc.) as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities (continent, planet, person, corporation) and may be used when referring to instances of a specific class (a continent, another planet, these persons, our corporation). Some proper nouns occur in plural form (optionally or exclusively), and then they refer to groups of entities considered as unique (the Hendersons, the Everglades, the Azores, the Pleiades).
Compound (linguistics)In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme (less precisely, a word or sign) that consists of more than one stem. Compounding, composition or nominal composition is the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes. Compounding occurs when two or more words or signs are joined to make a longer word or sign. A compound that uses a space rather than a hyphen or concatenation is called an open compound or a spaced compound; the alternative is a closed compound.
Written languageA written language is the representation of a language by means of writing. This involves the use of visual symbols, known as graphemes, to represent linguistic units such as phonemes, syllables, morphemes, or words. However, it is important to note that written language is not merely spoken or signed language written down, though it can approximate that. Instead, it is a separate system with its own norms, structures, and stylistic conventions, and it often evolves differently than its corresponding spoken or signed language.
EtymologyEtymology (ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi ) is the scientific study of the origin and evolution of a word's semantic meaning across time, including its constituent morphemes and phonemes. It is a subfield of historical linguistics, philology and semiotics, and draws upon comparative semantics, morphology, pragmatics, and phonetics in order to construct a comprehensive and chronological catalogue of all meanings that a morpheme, phoneme, word, or sign has carried across time.
InflectionIn linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles, etc., as declension.
English languageEnglish is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family. It originated in early medieval England and, today, is the most spoken language in the world and the third most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. English is the most widely learned second language and is either the official language or one of the official languages in 59 sovereign states. There are more people who have learned English as a second language than there are native speakers.
SymbolA symbol is a mark, sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, object, or relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by creating linkages between otherwise very different concepts and experiences. All communication (and data processing) is achieved through the use of symbols. Symbols take the form of words, sounds, gestures, ideas, or visual s and are used to convey other ideas and beliefs.
LexemeA lexeme (ˈlɛksiːm) is a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through inflection. It is a basic abstract unit of meaning, a unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single root word. For example, in English, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, which can be represented as RUN. One form, the lemma (or citation form), is chosen by convention as the canonical form of a lexeme.
PronunciationPronunciation is the way in which a word or a language is spoken. This may refer to generally agreed-upon sequences of sounds used in speaking a given word or language in a specific dialect ("correct" or "standard" pronunciation) or simply the way a particular individual speaks a word or language. Words' pronunciations can be found in reference works such as dictionaries. General-purpose dictionaries typically only include standard pronunciations, but regional or dialectal pronunciations may be found in more specific works.
Conjunction (grammar)In grammar, a conjunction (abbreviated or ) is a part of speech that connects words, phrases, or clauses that are called the conjuncts of the conjunctions. That definition may overlap with that of other parts of speech, and so what constitutes a "conjunction" must be defined for each language. In English, a given word may have several senses, and be either a preposition or a conjunction depending on the syntax of the sentence. For example, after is a preposition in "he left after the fight" but is a conjunction in "he left after they fought".
Consonant mutationConsonant mutation is change in a consonant in a word according to its morphological or syntactic environment. Mutation occurs in languages around the world. A prototypical example of consonant mutation is the initial consonant mutation of all modern Celtic languages. Initial consonant mutation is also found in Indonesian or Malay, in Nivkh, in Southern Paiute and in several West African languages such as Fula. The Nilotic language Dholuo, spoken in Kenya, shows mutation of stem-final consonants, as does English to a small extent.
PunctuationPunctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from 9th century BC, consisting of points between the words and horizontal strokes between sections. The alphabet-based writing begun with no spaces, no capitalization, no vowels (see abjad), and with only a few punctuation marks, as it was mostly aimed at recording business transactions.
OrthographyAn orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word boundaries, emphasis, and punctuation. Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and most of these systems have undergone substantial standardization, thus exhibiting less dialect variation than the spoken language. These processes can fossilize pronunciation patterns that are no longer routinely observed in speech (e.g.
Spoken languageA spoken language is a language produced by articulate sounds or (depending on one's definition) manual gestures, as opposed to a written language. An oral language or vocal language is a language produced with the vocal tract in contrast with a sign language, which is produced with the body and hands. The term "spoken language" is sometimes used to mean only oral languages, especially by linguists, excluding sign languages and making the terms 'spoken', 'oral', 'vocal language' synonymous.
DictionaryA dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by consonantal root for Semitic languages or radical and stroke for logographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies, pronunciations, translation, etc. It is a lexicographical reference that shows inter-relationships among the data. A broad distinction is made between general and specialized dictionaries.
Root (linguistics)A root (or root word) is the core of a word that is irreducible into more meaningful elements. In morphology, a root is a morphologically simple unit which can be left bare or to which a prefix or a suffix can attach. The root word is the primary lexical unit of a word, and of a word family (this root is then called the base word), which carries aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. Content words in nearly all languages contain, and may consist only of, root morphemes.
