Types of morphemes in English and Russian

The main unit of the morphological level is a morpheme. The words consist of morphemes separate parts with grammatical significance. The primary element of a word is the root. It is the main unchangeable part of the word conveying lexical meaning. Besides words contain affixes - prefixes and suffixes, which modify the meaning of the word, and suffixes also change the word from one part of speech to another – work-worker. The stem is the part of the word which includes the root and affixes. Endings or flections express different grammatical meanings implied in words of all grammatical forms, affixation is the most frequently used. Prefixes and suffixes are used in the majority of known languages. In Russian for ex, prefixes are more common in verbs and suffixes in nouns,. There are some common features in English and Russian affixes from the point of view of their origin. Some suffixes were independent words before they became affixes, for ex. English – freedom, dom had the meaning of decision, power, independent word. Some affixes were borrowed from latin and greek like –able, -ism, -ist, -extra, which are more or less alive in present day English and Russian. In the course of historical development the boundaries between morphemes in a word may change. Words change morphologically. The main factors contributed to this change were discovered by the Russian philologist Pr.Bogorididsky who called this changes simplification (опрощение) and decomposition (переразложение) simplification is a grammatical process in the result of which a word loses the independent meanings of its component parts. For ex in Russian the word ВКУС is not divided now into prefix в and root кус, though this word was considered to be compound, now it is treated as one morphemic word. In English words friend used to be suffix ND, in the word Forbid, prefix FO, but now in present day English they are treated as one morphemic word.