Molecular assemblerA molecular assembler, as defined by K. Eric Drexler, is a "proposed device able to guide chemical reactions by positioning reactive molecules with atomic precision". A molecular assembler is a kind of molecular machine. Some biological molecules such as ribosomes fit this definition. This is because they receive instructions from messenger RNA and then assemble specific sequences of amino acids to construct protein molecules. However, the term "molecular assembler" usually refers to theoretical human-made devices.
Nonconcatenative morphologyNonconcatenative morphology, also called discontinuous morphology and introflection, is a form of word formation and inflection in which the root is modified and which does not involve stringing morphemes together sequentially. Apophony Ablaut and Umlaut (linguistics) In English, for example, while plurals are usually formed by adding the suffix -s, certain words use nonconcatenative processes for their plural forms: foot /fʊt/ → feet /fiːt/; Many irregular verbs form their past tenses, past participles, or both in this manner: freeze /ˈfriːz/ → froze /ˈfroʊz/, frozen /ˈfroʊzən/.
Root (linguistics)A root (or root word) is the core of a word that is irreducible into more meaningful elements. In morphology, a root is a morphologically simple unit which can be left bare or to which a prefix or a suffix can attach. The root word is the primary lexical unit of a word, and of a word family (this root is then called the base word), which carries aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. Content words in nearly all languages contain, and may consist only of, root morphemes.
