morpheme

For example, the morpheme er-, which qualified most anything having to do with an outer body part, could be stuck to -cho to yield ercho, meaning “head.”

Those words are made up of morphemes, small elements that change their meaning depending on how they are combined.

On the pretext of performing usability testing for Sparkle Dungeon 5, she is taught “power morphemes” — ways to condense layers of meaning into abstract sounds that can bend real-world physics, shattering glass and folding space-time.

She draws pictures illustrating each mouth morpheme — the lip and tongue postures that act as adjectives and adverbs.

I was imitating something linguistically unique to sign language called “mouth morphemes” — moving your tongue rapidly to demonstrate distance or swelling your cheeks like balloons to show size.