PHONEME AND MORPHEME

Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language. Phonemes are the smallest units of sound in a language.
Phoneme and Morpheme

Phoneme

A phoneme is the smallest unit (sound) of language which serves to distinguish words from one another.

For example:
"bat" and "but" are two different words because they have two different phonemes.(a and u)


Counting Phonemes in a Word

cat.....3 phonemes (/k/a/t/)
cream.....4 phonemes (/k/r/ē/m/)
knock.....3 phonemes (/n/o/k/)
shadow.....4 phonemes (/sh/a/d/ō)

How many distinct phonemes are there?
This is asking how many different smallest unit of sound can we make? The answer is about 44. So we can make 44 different sounds with about 44 different mouth gestures. Here is a good list of phonemes in English.


Morpheme

A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of language that cannot be broken into smaller parts. A word can be composed of one or more morphemes.

Morpheme Example:

"Submarine" is a word made up of two morphemes: sub and marine.
There are two morphemes: sub and marine. However, in the same word there are eight phonemes: s, u, b, m, a, r, i, n (e is silent).

Unforgettable for instance is made up of three morphemes and twelve phonemes.
Un-forget-able (un is a prefix meaning "not" forget is the root morpheme and able is an adjective forming suffix)