Results Details

The morphemes of the language of priest-kings, those smallest intelligible information bits, in particular roots and affixes, are, of course, like the morphemes of English, extremely numerous. The normal morpheme, in their language as in ours, consists of a sequence of phonemes. For example, in English 'bit' is one morpheme but three phonemes, as will appear clear if given some reflection. Similarly in the language of the priest-kings, the seventy-three "phonemes" or basic scents are used to form the meaning units of the language, and a single morpheme of priest-kings may consist of a complex set of odors. I do not know whether there are more morphemes in the language of the priest-kings or in English, but both are apparently rich languages, and, of course, the strict morpheme count is not necessarily a reliable index to the complexity of the lexicon, because of combinations of morphemes to form new words. German, for example, tends to rely somewhat more on morpheme combination than does English or French. I was told, incidentally, that the language of the priest-kings does possess more morphemes than English but I do not know if the report is truthful or not, for priest-kings tend to be somewhat touchy on the matter of any comparisons, particularly those to their disadvantage or putative disadvantage, with organisms of what they regard as the lower orders. - (Priest-Kings of Gor, Chapter )