Phoneme

At its root, a "phonetic value" (or phone) is the absolute acoustic value of a sound that a person makes when he or she speaks. This value can be measured precisely by electronic machinery, and allows Linguists to specify the perhaps to most speakers unnoticeable differences between how one speaker articulates a sound, and how another might, both thinking them the same sound.

But a phonemic value is much different. A phonemic value is the sound as it is heard by the listeners. That is, how speakers of a language perceive the sound that they are making. Perhaps an illustration may make this idea more clear.

We in English oftentimes wonder why it is that foreigners often make the mistake of pronouncing the sound [I] (i.e., "ih") as [i] ("ee"). "There's nothing hard about it," we may say, and for us, that's true. The reason for this difficulty is that, say, Spanish speakers never make such a distinction in their own language. In English, we can come up with pairs of words (called by linguists minimal pairs) where the only difference between two words is a single sound. A good example with reference to the example above is the pair "live : leave". In English, we know these are different sounds because when we pronounce the two words, we hear the slight difference in sound which is coupled with meaning. When we arrive at this point, we know that we are dealing not just with two similar sounding words with different meanings, but entirely different words.

Phonetic Chart

For starters, as we all know from childhood, the sounds we make come from our mouth. Now, this would seem simplistic, but in reality, it's a highly complex subject, which has bred a whole subprofession of phoneticists who study how the sounds in our mouth are created.

Sounds in the world's language can come from some vary strange places for your standard average European speaker. All sounds in English are pulmonic, that is, they're made by air being expelled from the lungs passing over the various mouth organs. Other possibilities, however, can and are used: the famed clicks of African languages are produced by the velaric air stream mechanism, by pressing the back of the tongue to the roof of the soft palate (the velum) and simultaneously constricting the flow in other parts of the front of the mouth.

There are also glottalic sounds, made by pressing the glottis up or down in the back of the mouth (you can feel the glottis moving up in your throat if you say "hi" and put your hand to your Adam's Apple). These sounds in particular are characteristic of some Caucasian languages, and of the South American Native language Quechua. For our purposes, though, it is safe to know that all of Degaspregos's sounds are pulmonic, just like English's, so it should be easy for many readers out there.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, are the actual physical locations in the mouth that condition the various types of sounds we hear. A diagram would be best, but until I have access to a scanner, I won't be able to do a good one! (hopefully coming soon). Here's a short list though that may help.

Place of Articulation:

Bilabial  : produced by placing both lips together. Ex: p, b, m.
Dental*   : produced by touching the tongue to the back of the teeth. Ex: t, d, n.
Alveolar* : produced by touching the tip of the tongue to the ridges on the roof
            of the mouth. Ex: t, d, n. 
Retroflex : the tongue curls back upon itself, causing all sounds to have "r-coloring"
Palatal   : back of the tongue touches the hard palate (or just the palate). 
            Ex: _k_ in "_k_ey"
Velar     : back of the tongue touches the soft palate (velum). Ex: _c_ in _c_ool.
            also, most instances of k, g, and ng.
Labiovelar: where both the back of the tongue touches the velum and the lips round.
            Ex: w as in witch, wh as in which (for some dialects, these are the same).
Glottal   : sounds such as h.

The above are all referenced as stops, where the airflow is directly obstructed by the tongue or otherwise. There are, however, other ways of producing sounds:

Other Types of Articulation:

Fricative   : there is almost(but not quite) closure of the airflow. This produces
              a whole range of sounds in English: f, v, th (_th_ing), th (_th_is), 
              s, z, sh, zh. Also, sounds like "ch" in Bach (the velar fricative)
Affricate   : a combination of a stop and a fricative, such as _ts_, _dz_, ch 
              (phonetically t+sh), j (phon. d+zh).
Approximant : sounds like r, l, y, w, hw. In many languages, r is what is called
              a tap or a trill (as in Span. burro).  

Morphemes and Morphology

Morphology is basically the next level up in complexity. It is the first point where sound and meaning combine to aid communication. At base, morphology is the study of word-forms, as the name might indicate. It's the study of how words are put together, and how they operate within a sentence (and it's for this reason that morphology can be seen as a subset of syntax). Perhaps an illustration will clarify this.

All languages have some method by which they construct words (i.e., have some system of morphology). This means, for example, that words in English can most often be described in terms of prefixes and suffixes, and such things, which are used mostly (in English, at least) to alter the basic meaning of the root word to which they have been attached. For example, the English word foresight can be broken down into two smaller constituent components: fore, which operates here as the prefix, and sight which is the root word and carries a general meaning. By combining the two together, a new term has been created to described the union of those two ideas. This is an example of what may be considered agglutination, which is the process of simply tacking on a bound affix to a base root meaning.

Languages differ in large part on the extent to which they use this. Some like Chinese (a highly isolating language), make practically no use of it, while others, like Finnish, use it to sometimes seemingly bizarre extremes. This process of adding on endings is closely related to the process of inflection, but there we enter more complex areas. Both Agglutinating and Inflecting languages use the concept of adding affixes to alter the meanings of words, but the difference is essentially in the "regularity" and of scope. With agglutinating languages, this process uses a string of affixes, each with its own meaning. This means that when a given suffix exists for a given meaning, and for most people who learn languages of this type, they seem to be much more regular and rule-oriented than the more inflecting languages. Degaspregos uses all endings like this, without exception, as are many artificial languages. Natural languages like Quechua (Peruvian language) and Basque are representative of this.

Other languages are of the inflecting type. These languages tend not to be so synthetic in structure, in that they don't have huge strings of endings for a given meaning: just one, albeit a complex one semantically, will do. This is more or less a defining characteristic of inflecting languages, that they tend to conflate two or more different ideas into one ending, such as making both the accusative case and plural ending one form, with a different and perhaps totally unrelated ending for the singular. This is the case with Latin and Greek, as well as many other European languages. European inflecting languages also usually show the problem of using different sets of endings for different sets of words, though there may be no inate reason for them to do this (these are called declinsions).

But it would be misleading to say that any given language is entirely inflecting or isolating or agglutinating. No, all languages are a mixture of all three, though each one varies in the amount of each category. English for example is for the most part isolating, but is more strongly agglutinating than it is inflecting. Older forms of English showed the opposite trend: they were predominated by inflection and agglutination, and less so by isolation. From this we see that a language may change its form over a period of time, depending more or less on affixation as each generation sees fit. It should also be stressed that all these terms, like agglutinating and inflecting, are not water-tight, and are not necessarily mutually exclusive (for the reason given above).

In a sense, languages go through a cycle of changing from one typology to another. Very generally, they go through stages of predominantly inflecting, predominantly isolating, predominantly agglutinating, and back again to inflecting (in that order). Usually this is because the inflections will drop off, usually through phonetic factors, and thus the language will enter a more isolating stage (which is exactly what English has done). That same isolating language may, many years on, acquire particles or otherwise small words, which then become bound to the root, being unable to be used in their own right. It has thus entered an agglutinating stage, which may thereafter turn back into inflecting when the separate endings become blurred, so to speak, with one another, with one ending having multiple meanings attached to it.