Table of Contents
This chapter explains the morphology of Ouxu words. It briefly goes over parts of speech that are explained more thoroughly in the grammar chapter, and also covers pronunciation of stress in a word. It discusses borrowing words from other languages.
There are only two basic parts of speech (though they have subkinds). Every complete word is either a particle or a content word.
A particle is a word in itself, and has its own dictionary entry. There are several kinds of particle, each of which is written into the grammar as a special case. See Grammar and Meaning.
A content word is made up of parts. It starts with a root. It may continue with further roots and derivational suffixes, which change the meaning. It always ends with one inflectional suffix which indicates its functional role in the sentence. This is explained in detail in Grammar and Meaning. See Derivational Suffixes, Compound Words, Inflections.
Dictionary entries are marked with hyphens to show whether they are particles, roots, derivational suffixes, or inflectional suffixes.
Table 3.1. Hyphens in Dictionary Entries
| particle | a word in itself |
| root- | starts a content word |
| -derivational- | after the root, before the inflectional suffix |
| -inflectional | ends a content word |
For a sense of scale, the Ouxu dictionary has 52 particles, 1384 roots, 137 derivational suffixes and 39 inflectional suffixes, for a total of 1612 entries.