Morphemes 

+Yulex You're welcome! One of my best friends is part Mi'kmaq. He'd have killed me if I screwed up the pronunciation in a video. ^_^

+Rebecka Leigh Sure! Glad to be able to help out. ^_^

+Clare O'Brien Great! Glad to be able to help. ^_^

Glad to be able to help! ^_^

Divi As a long-time Nerdfighter, I think I have to take that as a compliment! We're going for our own style, but I can't say we don't have any influence from Crash Course on the project. DFTBA!

Thanks! We had fun with it - it's part of what makes script writing enjoyable. ^_^

As a native speaker of Chinese, I have to respectfully disagree. The negation characters can stand alone just like how the word "not" can stand alone; I wouldn't consider them prefixes (even though, if they are on their own, they probably won't mean very much.) Particles such as 吧 and 吗 are never said alone, but they are not considered to be attached to other words, just like how the word "a" or "an" is never said alone, but it is not considered "attached" to other words. Words that have two or more characters are mostly comprised of two free morphemes like compound words in English, such as "firetruck" or "lampshade." Chinese is pretty much entirely composed of free morphemes. I do appreciate your interest in the Chinese language and your offering of a different point of view though. I think the "I heart" sticker says "I heart phonetics" in IPA.

Good discussion Andy. I can certainly concede on 吧 and 吗, but take 可 as an example - this is an entirely bound morpheme that denotes "can" or "possible" - 可以，可能，可是，等等。Chinese two character words, of which these represent a large part of the colloquial vocabulary for nouns, are comprised largely of one bound and one free morpheme. Test this across a wide array of nouns - 桌子，你们。。。 Andy, I was raised in China and graduated from 北大 - I appreciate your comments about my interest in Chinese, but I don't think I am who you think I am.

Todd Main Ahh. I see what you mean about the 可 thing. After taking what you said into consideration, let me restate my thesis: Archaic Chinese was most likely comprised solely of free morphemes. Thank you for your input!

+Todd Main In some phrases, however, one may drop the word after 可。Would it then still be considered a bound morpheme?

I hope this is helpful; some morphemes might have a direct meaning as in an easy definition. For example, "cat" refers to the animal we all know, whereas the morpheme "'s" in "cats" has a meaning in that we understand that the "'s" refers to plurality, even though the letter "s" doesn't necessarily 'mean' plurality in a simple definition. Both of these have meaning, but the meaning doesn't always mean a definition, per se. The meaning refers to an understanding of a grammatical function or context. I hope this clarifies your understanding.

​@@kiraomernik9378 Thank your your kind and thoughtful reply. If I have understood you correctly, your point is that although plural s always has to follow a noun, it can be abstracted from any particular noun such as "cat". For this precise reason, it fits into the category of morpheme: plural s is a unit of meaning, because to understand its meaning one does not need to see it sitting with any particular noun. If I have guessed your meaning correctly, then I find your answer very convincing and should thank you again for kindly helping clarify my understanding.

When I was in a field methods class, the professor passingly discussed how to determine the word breaks in a stream of morphemes received from an elicitation session. Her work was mostly in Oneida, a language from the same family as Mohawk. If I remember right, she said that if you take two morphemes and you can put a word between them, then they are separate words. (I've somewhat botched that citation. Fact check me). If we apply that principle to your question we can arrive at the answer. In English we say and write, "The house". If we want to add an adjective we say and write, "The big house". If "the" were a bound morpheme, it would be attached to "big" in the second sentence. Essentially the second sentence would read more like "[The big]....[house]". That is a rather meaningless sentence. What is "the big"? What is "house" doing just dangling there? Adjectives aren't modified by articles like "the" or "a". This is where syntax begins to blend with morphology (conjuring memories of the quip: "Yesterday's syntax is today's morphology" or something along those lines). We know that "the" only modifies nouns. We know that a word can be inserted between "the" and the noun it modifies. Therefore, we know that "the" is not bound to the nouns it modifies, but in fact is a free morpheme. My knowledge of Hebrew grammar is fading, but I believe that nothing comes between "ha" and a noun it coincides with. We might be able to say that "the" doesn't mean anything on its own, but does any word in English mean anything on its own? The only example I can think of is the imperative form of verbs. "Yes", "no", and prepositions like "here" and "there" might stand on their own, but they are still meaningless if taken out of the context of a larger dialog. Of course, it is an interesting point you bring up about the independence of "the". It is a word that requires the presence of a noun in order to be realized in speech. You should read up on clitics. Perhaps English "the" is best analyzed as a clitic. tl;dr In English we put other words between "the" and the nouns it modifies. In Hebrew they don't.

+Keveen Mihdidin Thanks for the kind words! We're glad to be able to help. ^_^

Glad to be able to help! Hope it went well. ^_^

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Thanks! I do rather like that one. ^_^

"Rekillable" was probably just a joke, as in "Most zombies are rekillable"