Short answers, pulled from the story.
The smallest units of language are meaning-bearing fragments called morphemes, which can exist independently or only as parts of larger words. This concept reveals that words are complex structures built from smaller components rather than monolithic entities.
The term morphology was introduced into linguistics in 1859 when August Schleicher coined the word to describe the study of word structure. This occurred after ancient traditions in India, Greece, Rome, and Arabic had already established foundations for linguistic analysis.
Morphology operates at a scale larger than phonology, which deals with speech sounds, yet smaller than syntax, which governs how words combine into sentences. The field bridges the gap between physical sounds and abstract rules that govern meaning.
Morphological rules are categorized into inflectional rules, which relate to different forms of the same lexeme, and word formation rules, which relate to different lexemes. Inflectional rules never change a word's grammatical category, whereas word formation rules may change the grammatical category of the source word.
Allomorphy refers to cases where the same distinction is effected by alternative forms of a word, such as the plural pairs ox and oxen or goose and geese. Phonological rules constrain sounds in these forms, sometimes requiring vowel insertion to create permitted sound sequences.
Philologists in the 19th century classified languages as isolating, agglutinative, or inflectional or fusional based on their morphological structure. Isolating languages like Chinese have little to no morphology, agglutinative languages like Turkish have easily separable morphemes, and fusional languages like Latin fuse morphemes together to convey multiple pieces of information.