hello everybody welcome in this video we will be talking about morphological analysis or the process that you use to figure out a problem like this looking at a data set from a language that you may know nothing about and you have to match translations with their forms represented in the language that you are analyzing so before we go any further if you have no heard it not already done so I would recommend that you look at part 1 on the morphology video that is on my channel because it gives you useful information on first what a morpheme is as well as information on how to determine morphemes in a language so all of the examples were from English in that video but it is a useful tool kit for when you are looking at another language so let's walk you through this process incidentally this exercise is very similar to a puzzle called a crypto equipped crypto clips often appear in newspapers and it's basically where one letter represents another letter throughout the puzzle and it usually is some sort of joke or silly pun but that kind of process in solving a crypto quip is very similar to the process that you use to solve a morphological analysis problem so solving crypto quick puzzles is great practice for morphological analysis and I guess vice versa all right so just another reminder before we get started here is if you're looking at a language and you may know some of that language you want to try to forget that information and just treat the data that you see before you as the whole language itself of course this is not the entirety of Miculek on Aztec after all we're only looking at ten forms here with just a few morphemes that we have to account for house dog cornfield plural markers by your and his that's it so there are many more forms in this language but we don't need to know any of that we need to just look at this problem as if it is its own self-contained universe so we've got our data set up top and then we're going to essentially be answering questions in three parts here part one where we have me in English that we need to account for in this language Michoacan Aztec in part two that will require us to have done part one once we've done part one we could do this question where we have to figure out the English translation for the phrase be bindle and then we do the exact opposite activity for part three where we take a phrase in English like his corn fields and we translate it into this language so just a word about the language itself this is Miculek on aztec which is a dialect of Aztec horn now watch as it is often known and this is a you know as Tekken language that has spoken in Mexico a lot of people think of Aztec is just a dead language but Miculek on a stick actually has a few thousand speakers in Mexico all right so let's dive in here well the best place to start when you were looking at a morphological analysis problem for a language that you know nothing about is to look at forms that are very similar and maybe the best place to start is actually by looking at their glosses or their translations in English so if we look at a and B for example we can see that the translations are very similar for a we have my house that's no Connie and we need to kind of break that down and figure out what part means my what part means house and then we could look at B which is the same except for one thing we've got this added plural marker at the end that we will need to account for so this is a good place to start because it's kind of similar to this notion of a minimal pair in a language and I talked about a minimal pair in part two of the morphological of morphology that I uploaded even though minimal pairs have a lot more to do with phonology but anyway getting back to a and B here if you see that the gloss is my house for a and that the gloss for B is my houses there's only one category of difference here they both have this meaning of my they both have a meaning of house but this one has an added plural marker so what that means is any difference that you see reflected in the Miculek on Aztec forms for a and B the difference will be what's accounting for the plural marker so notice that no Kali is present in both of these forms for a and B but mass is extra so mess then must mean the plural marker in this language and we can then go ahead and write that down here being careful to put this enclosed in brackets to signify that this is the International phonetic alphabet since all of these are enclosed in brackets so it's not how it's just written in terms of the orthography or writing system of that language it may not even have one this is instead how you actually pronounce the form in that language so we want to be consistent and then write mass as the form that indicates the plural marker and then we can sort of do a brief double check here by looking at other forms where mess appears and see if plurality is also represented in the gloss and sure enough the only other time when we see mass pop up is the only other time when we see the plural marker represented in English so we've nicely just verified that mess in Miculek on Aztek must represent the plural marker kind of through a process of deduction so we've still got several other forms to account for and we can actually go to C and D that's a nice place to kind of keep going so look at this one it's your house versus his house so again we just look back at the forms represented in C and D and whatever is different that's going to represent the possessive pronoun so this one means mo Kali this one means Akali if this means your house and this means his house well that we could be pretty sure that mall must represent your and that e must represent HIDs so we can go ahead and write these in here so right next to his will write the e and of course this is a lowercase I but we are you the International phonetic alphabet here and this symbol represents the sound e and then going back to no or sorry weird actually do it mole mole must mean you're alright so we're moving along here and we could also kind of double check our work here because we could look at other places where this morpheme makes an appearance or where this translation makes an appearance so we can look at other translations in English and we would expect that mole should appear and we've got mole collie here that was the basis for a proposing that mole means your but it also appears here your cornfield and sure enough there's mult so that seems to check out just fine and we can do the same thing with his for his house we've got the e so that's our basis for making this claim that e represents his alright and then do we see his yeah there's his right there and sure enough there's e at the beginning so we've got enough evidence here to keep these as we've written him so now it just kind of gets easier the more morphemes you figure out the easier it is to determine the meanings of the other ones so if we go to look at say E and F that's another great place to compare forms because my dog compared with your dog very similar here so we've already determined that you're in this language is represented by the morpheme mole in Mishawaka naztech so sure enough mole makes an appearance there if we know that means you're well then everything after it that must mean dog so pen off may mean hair in Spanish but in this language Michoacana aztec it means dog all right and then if we go back to e here we've determined that pen off means dog so what comes before that we've gotten no well that must through a process of elimination represent the meaning for my and now we've got two more morphemes that we have to account for house and cornfield so if we go back to I guess C and D will allow us to answer these questions so we've already determined that you're in this language is mole and that e in this language means his so we can reliably say that Kiley means house and the last one that we need to figure out here is how to say cornfield and cornfield is only represented in letters H I and J again we've already determined that e means his so if this gloss is his cornfield we can isolate the E and determine that everything that comes after it that must mean the form for cornfield and we can do a little test here by looking at H I and J and just to make sure that if quoc mealy does mean cornfield e should mean his no should be my which it does and mul should mean your so once we've done the first part here this is sort of the hardest part of this whole process because we need to determine what each morpheme represents in Mishawaka naztech we've already done that now before we can move to part two it's really useful to determine the order of elements in this language and it's actually very similar to the order of elements in English so in English if we want to say my dog's well first you've got you've got my so that possessive pronoun comes first it precedes the noun dog and then you have a plural marker this is which comes after it that order is the exact same just by coincidence in Miculek on Aztec so if we've got a pedal here do you have any guesses as to what that actually means in English so a panel is the form in michoacán Aztec what does it mean in English see we could pause your video take a moment and try to determine what that means in English alright so if you've looked at this you see that the e means his and we know that the possessive pronoun always comes first in this language so we can say that already this means his and we also know that panel means dog in this language and that that noun always comes second so e panel must mean his dog in Miculek on Aztek now part three is the exact opposite activity where you now have a phrase in English his cornfields and you have to determine how to say it in Mishawaka aztec don't panic you may not speak the language but that's alright you've got all the information here to allow you to determine the answer so his once again we've already determined well that must mean e and kind of going back to our order here which says that you basically just get the possessive pronoun and then you get the noun and then after that you get the plural marker so if we follow that order then we can write in brackets his corn fields must be e and he guesses what comes next got cornfield so that's quite really and then we have to account for that plural marker because s denotes plural in English but it's not that way in Mitchum akan the plural marker is mass so we put mess at the very end and that is how we say his cornfields in Miculek on Aztec equanimous I'm probably not pronouncing that right but that's okay we're sort of just looking at this in terms of data on a page all right so that in a very brief way is how you go about doing morphological analysis so just as a brief recap here when you're looking at the data don't panic you may not know anything about the language that you're analyzing but you will be able to do it you treat the data as if it's its own self-contained universe and it's really useful to have a highlighter or several colored pencils and you could either highlight each morpheme or you can just use one pen and underline it for one morpheme and use a squiggly underline for another morpheme you could circle one morpheme to represent yet another one this isn't required but it's a useful way especially if you're just starting out to help you to visually organize information and to distinguish visually one morpheme from another alright thank you for tuning in I hope you found this video useful and in the meantime I hope you have a great day take care