The root is the primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. Not to be mistaken with Lexicography. A word is a unit of Language that carries meaning and consists of one or more Morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together and has a Phonetic Semantics is the study of meaning in communication The word derives from Greek σημαντικός ( semantikos) "significant" from Content words in nearly all languages contain, and may consist only of, root morphemes. A language is a dynamic set of visual auditory or tactile Symbols of Communication and the elements used to manipulate them In Morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. However, sometimes the term "root" is also used to describe the word minus its inflectional endings, but with its lexical endings in place. In Grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as tense, mood, voice For example, chatters has the inflectional root or lemma chatter, but the lexical root chat. In Linguistics a lemma (plural lemmas or lemmata) has two distinct interpretations morphology / Lexicography: the Inflectional roots are often called stems, and a root in the stricter sense may be thought of as a monomorphemic stem. In Linguistics, a stem (sometimes also theme) is the part of a word that is common to all its inflected variants
Roots can be either free morphemes or bound morphemes. In Linguistics, free morphemes (sometimes also referred to as unbound morphemes) are Morphemes that can stand alone unlike Bound morphemes which In Etymology, a bound morpheme is a Root morpheme that cannot stand alone as an independent word Root morphemes are essential for affixation and compounds. An affix is a Morpheme that is attached to a stem to form a word In Linguistics, a compound is a Lexeme (less precisely a Word) that consists of more than one stem.
The root of a word is a unit of meaning (morpheme) and, as such, it is an abstraction, though it can usually be represented in writing as a word would be. For example, it can be said that the root of the English verb form running is run, or the root of the Spanish superlative adjective amplísimo is ampli-, since those words are clearly derived from the root forms by simple suffixes that do not alter the roots in any way. In particular, English has very little inflection, and hence a tendency to have words that are identical to their roots. But more complicated inflection, as well as other processes, can obscure the root; for example, the root of mice is mouse (still a valid word), and the root of interrupt is, arguably, rupt, which is not a word in English and only appears in derivational forms (such as disrupt, corrupt, rupture, etc. A mouse (plural mice) is a small Animal that belongs to one ). The root rupt is written as if it were a word, but it's not.
An example of a widely used English root is WR, as in wring, write, wrestle, writhe, etc. , where it has a basic meaning of twisting.
This distinction between the word as a unit of speech and the root as a unit of meaning is even more important in the case of languages where roots have many different forms when used in actual words, as is the case in Semitic languages. The Semitic languages are a Language family whose living representatives are spoken by more than 467 million people across much of the Middle East, In these, roots are formed by consonants alone, and different words (belonging to different parts of speech) are derived from the same root by inserting vowels. In the terminology used to discuss the grammar of the Semitic languages and some other Afro-Asiatic languages, a triliteral ( Arabic: جذر ثلاثي For example, in Hebrew, the root gdl represents the idea of largeness, and from it we have gadol and gdola (masculine and feminine forms of the adjective "big"), gadal "he grew", higdil "he magnified" and magdelet "magnifier", along with many other words such as godel "size" and migdal "tower".
See also
- Lemma (linguistics)
- Lexeme
- List of Proto-Semitic stems
- Morphological typology
- Morphology
- Principal parts
- List of Proto-Indo-European roots
- Stem
External links
- Virtual Salt Root words and prefixes
- American Heritage Dictionary list of Indo-European roots
- Kwiznet - Greek and Latin Root Words
- Espindle - Greek and Latin Root Words
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