Designing an Artificial Language: Morphology
Author: Rick Morneau
MS Date: 07-16-1994
FL Date: 12-01-2018
FL Number: FL-000057-00
Citation: Morneau, Rick. 1994. «Designing an Artificial
Language: Morphology.» FL-000057-00, Fiat
Lingua,
December 2018.
Copyright: © 1994 Rick Morneau. This work is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
Fiat Lingua is produced and maintained by the Language Creation Society (LCS). For more information
about the LCS, visit http://www.conlang.org/
Designing an Artificial Language:
Morphology
by Rick Morneau
September, 1991
Revised July 16, 1994
Copyright © 1991, 1994 by Richard A. Morneau,
all rights reserved.
[The following essay was originally published in the September 1991 issue of the Linguica APA
(Issue #9). I have made a few minor changes since then.]
In this essay, I will discuss ways in which phonemes can be combined into morphemes (minimal
units of meaning), and how morphemes can be combined into words. I will discuss morphology
only in a very restricted sense; i.e., the shapes of words. I will not discuss inflectional
morphology at all. And I will postpone the discussion of derivational morphology to my
monograph on Lexical Semantics. As a result, this essay will be somewhat abstract.
Since the morphological rules of a language state how phonemes can be linked together to form
morphemes, the morphology of a language will have a strong effect on how easy or difficult it is
to pronounce. Fortunately or unfortunately, most people have difficulty with complex consonant
clusters, and so words such as mksjzptlk are not likely to be part of any language’s lexicon
(unless, of course, you’re from the fifth dimension :-). Even clusters that some people consider
simple can be quite a challenge to others. For example, most Indo-European languages allow
consonant clusters within a single syllable. English examples of this are the «str» in «string», the
«bl» in «blue», the «spl» in «splash», the «sk» in «skip», and the «pr» in «prune». Native speakers
of most Indo-European languages have few if any problems producing these sounds, but others
who study English find them quite difficult and many never master them. Keep this in mind
when designing your artificial language (henceforth AL) if you want your language to appeal to
as many people as possible.
A word can consist of one or more syllables. For the purpose of this discussion, a syllable is a
vowel or diphthong optionally preceded by one or more consecutive consonants, and optionally
followed by one or more consecutive consonants. Thus, for the vast majority of languages, a
syllable has the form:
{C}V{V}{C} where {} indicates zero or more of the
enclosed item
C indicates a consonant
V indicates a vowel or semivowel
1
However, very few languages take full advantage of the capabilities of the human vocal tract. In
fact, a large majority of the world’s languages manage to get by with a subset of the above
structure which looks more like this:
[C][S]V[V][S][N] where [] indicates that the enclosed
item is optional
C indicates a consonant
S indicates a semivowel
V indicates a vowel
N indicates a nasal
Thus, the simpler structure will allow syllables pronounced like English «him», «queen», «boa»
and «toy», but it will not allow syllables like «hit», «string», «plank» or «flirt». The more complex
structure will allow either. Note that the lack of consonant clusters and the requirement that the
final consonant be a nasal greatly reduces the number of possible syllables that one can create
from a fixed phonemic inventory. However, when two such syllables are juxtaposed, the result is
very easy to pronounce. For example, speakers of Indo-European languages can pronounce /
gwikto/ as easily as /gwinto/, but speakers of most other languages will find /gwikto/ so difficult
that they will often slip in a vowel between the /k/ and the /t/. The nasal /n/ is not a problem
because nasals are highly vocalic in nature, and co-articulate very smoothly with the preceding
vowel.
If you feel that the second structure is too limiting, you may want to consider a compromise
which will be easy to pronounce for most but not all people, and looks like this:
[C1][S]V[V][S][C2] where [] indicates that the enclosed
item is optional
C1 indicates any consonant
S indicates a semivowel
V indicates a vowel
C2 indicates a continuant
consonant or a nasal
Continuant consonants are fricatives and liquids; i.e., just about everything except nasals, stops
and affricates. However, a potential problem shows up here when C2 of a syllable equals C1 of
the following syllable, as in /bassun/. One solution is simply to insist that the double consonant
be audibly lengthened. A second approach is to use only non-continuants and non-nasals for C1.
Once you’ve decided on the general shape of a syllable, the next step is to decide how to hook
them together to form morphemes and words. At this point, you have two choices: an ad hoc
approach or a formal approach. If you plan to borrow morphemes directly from existing
languages, then you’re limited to the ad hoc approach. Basically, you’ll choose your morphemes
from existing languages and combine the roots, prefixes, suffixes and infixes to create a word.
Esperanto and most of the ALs based on European languages fall into this category.
2
In a more formal approach, the shape of a morpheme will indicate the role it plays in a word.
Thus, a prefix will have a different shape than a root, which will have a different shape than a
suffix, and so forth. In fact, if you play your cards right, you will not only be able to split a word
into it’s component morphemes on sight, but you’ll also know where word boundaries are, even if
there are no spaces or pauses between them. You might say that your morphemes and words are
auto-isolating or self-segregating. This, of course, would be ideal if you want to speak to a
computer, since you won’t have to put pauses between words. [By the way, the problem of
isolating words in continuous speech is one of the most difficult that the speech-processing
community is now facing. I don’t expect a solution any time soon.]
So, how do we create a self-segregating morphology? We do it by insuring that each type of
morpheme can always be identified by its shape, and by insuring that each type can occupy only
one position in a word. Consider a simple example of an easy-to-pronounce language with only
three morpheme types:
C = b, p, d, t, g, k, z, s, v, f
V = a, e, i, o, u
S = y, w
N = m, n
prefix = CSV
root = CVN
suffix = CV
word = {prefix} {root} suffix
Thus, examples of complete words would be: za, ke, tembo, sandu, kwabe, pyobendi,
kyusintemda, byupwetu, and so on. Note that if we removed all spaces and squished them all
together, we could easily and unambiguously split them apart. This example, however, has at
least one serious flaw. Since the root form is CVN, the maximum number of roots we can form
with our phoneme inventory is only 10 x 5 x 2 = 100. Since we’ll need much more than that, let’s
add disyllabic and trisyllabic root forms:
C = b, p, d, t, g, k, z, s, v, f
V = a, e, i, o, u
S = y, w
N = m, n
SPECIAL = q (English «ch» in «church»)
x (English «sh» in «shop»)
prefix = CSV
root = CVN or CV[N]qV[N] or CV[N]xV[N]CV[N]
suffix = CV
word = {prefix} {root} suffix
3
Note that «q» and «x» simply indicate that the root continues with one or two more syllables,
respectively. Examples of two-syllable roots would be binqan, temqu and saqem. Examples of
three-syllable roots would be kuxiba, tixendi, zomxate and panxotun. Next, add prefixes and
suffixes and you would have something like kwabinqandu, temqusa, pyosaqembe, kuxibato,
fyotixendika, zomxatebi, and panxotunki. (With this type of morphology, no one is going to
accuse you of being Eurocentric. 🙂 Note that, even with this small phonemic inventory, you can
create 2,250 unique disyllabic roots and 337,500 unique trisyllabic roots.
The above is just one of many possible examples of what can be done with a formally designed
morphology. There are many other things that you can do. You can add new forms such as CVC,
CV[S]N, C[S]VN, C[S]V[S]N, CV’V, CV’VN, C[S]V’VN, etc. (where the apostrophe indicates a
glottal stop)), or you can dedicate specific phonemes for specific purposes as we did above with
«q» and «x». Your choices are limited only by the requirements you set for yourself.
[Addendum: An idea that occurred to me after I wrote the above piece was to dedicate a vowel,
such as /a/, for exclusive use in creating polysyllabic morphemes. This phoneme would not be
used for anything else. For example, a morpheme of type CVN, could be tun, batun, kwasatun,
dambyamatun, and so on. In other words, whenever /a/ appears, it indicates that the morpheme
continues to the right. Only the last syllable is used to determine the morpheme’s type. See also
my (very long!) monograph Lexical Semantics for yet another way to implement a self-
segregating morphology.]
End of Essay
4
