ABSTRACT
A good transcription is essential for an analysis because only with a reliable text in hand can the linguistic anthropologist determine a language's grammatical structure and exact meaning. Linguistic theories and methods underwent great changes during the twentieth century, the transformational-generative approach of recent decades rapidly gaining followers. Some but not all bound morphemes in a language are affixes; attached to other morphemes, they modify meaning in some way and make more complex words. Just as languages differ in their phonemic systems, they differ in their morphologies. Some morphological processes, however, are quite common throughout the world, even though they may be applied differently in specific languages. Morphophonemic rules in any language are stable even if they are fairly complex. The study of languages and linguistics has been documented for ancient Greece as early as two and a half millennia ago. At about that time, the earliest preserved scientific grammar was compiled in India.
