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   Tsilagi Introduction
   Part 1 (saquui): The Morpheme (the what ?!?!)

   Tsilagi (jah-la-ghee) is the Cherokee word for the language. The
    Cherokee People are called Anitsalagi (ani-jah-la-gee). As a
    language tsilagi is "polysynthetic". Polysynthetic refers to the use of
    multiple word parts or morphemes in order to create one word or
    "word concept". A good explanation of this comes
    from Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme)

     Quote:



     The three main morpheme types in Tsilagi are as follows (1):

      In Tsilagi, there are fewer parts of speech than in European
      languages (i.e. English, French, Spanish etc.), but it makes up
      for this in its (often) extensive use of affixing morphemes to the
      roots in order to express more and more complex concepts.

     Let's look at the concept of morpheme usage in Tsilagi at work:

       In the above example, we see how the root word da-nv-tli (brother)
       is adjusted to express more complex concepts (my, his, many, we
       are).

       Hope this basic rundown helped. Please stay tuned ! Coming
       soon:
               - Morpheme Excersizes
               - Common Phonetic Symbols and the Syllabary

      Footnotes:
       (1) Echota Tsalagi Language Revitalization Project, Auburn University

The concept morpheme differs from the concept word, as many morphemes cannot stand as words on their own. A morpheme is free if it can stand
alone, or bound if it is used exclusively alongside a free morpheme. Its
actual phonetic representation is the morph, with the morphs representing
the same morpheme being grouped as its allomorphs.

English example:
The word "unbreakable" has three morphemes: "un-" (meaning not x), a
bound morpheme; "-break-", a free morpheme; and "-able". "un-" is also a
prefix, "-able" is a suffix. Both are affixes.

The morpheme plural-s has the morph "-s" in cats ([k�ts]), but "-es" in
dishes ([di??z]), and even the soft s, [z], in dogs ([dogz]). These are the
allomorphs of "-s". It might even change entirely into -ren in children.

Noun Roots - example yv-wi (person) and tsi-a-kwa
(bird)

Verb Roots - example: ne-ga (speak)

Particles - example: ya (principal, real, widely spread) and
dsi ( I )

Root Word --> da-nv-tli --> 'brother'


My Brother		tso-s-da-nv-tli
His Brother		di-na-da-nv-tli
Brothers		a-na-da-nv-tli
We are Brothers		tso-s-da-da-nv-tli