"Internet" is composed of several morphemes

Morphemes are the smallest combination of phonetics and semantics in language, and are the main units that constitute words. For example: "The Internet is becoming more and more popular among Chinese people." This sentence has twelve morphemes, most of which are monosyllabic. Only the loanword "Internet" contains three syllables.

There are two points in this passage in the "What is Vocabulary" in the first volume of "Chinese" for junior high schools published by the People's Education Press that are worthy of discussion.

First of all, the example given is "The Internet is becoming more and more popular among Chinese people". This sentence does not have 12 morphemes, but 13 morphemes. Perhaps the editor did not notice that "Internet" is a word composed of two morphemes, thus causing this error. Let us take a look at the origin of this word.

"Internet" is a foreign word. It is translated from the English word "Internet", "Inter" is the transliteration of "Inter", and "网" is the translation of "net". "Inter" is a word-forming component in English, which means "in...", "between...", "within..." and "mutually". Therefore, some people hard-translated "Internet" into "Internet" according to its meaning. (Actually, these two words have different meanings today.) Therefore, "INT" is a morpheme, and "NET" is another morpheme. "Internet" is a compound word composed of these two morphemes.

In fact, in modern Chinese, there are many foreign compound words that are partly translated into pronunciation and partly translated into meaning. Such as: pizza, KFC, beer, hamburger, jeep, jacket, and even words like Britain, America, and Euphrates River can be regarded as this type of compound words. If "Internet" is a simple word composed of a morpheme, then the words listed above can only be classified as a simple word composed of a morpheme. Wouldn't this be inconsistent with the concept of morphemes?

Secondly, the topic of this passage is inconsistent and the tone is inconsistent. The topic of "morphemes" has been discussed in the beginning of this paragraph, but the last clause "Only the loanword "Internet" contains three syllables" suddenly changes the topic to "loanwords". This makes the topic of this text inconsistent and the tone incoherent.

To sum up, this paragraph should be modified as follows:

Morphemes are the smallest combinations of phonetics and semantics in language and are the main units that constitute words. For example: "The Internet is becoming more and more popular among Chinese people." This sentence has thirteen morphemes, most of which are monosyllabic. Only the morpheme "Inter" includes two syllables.

Although the new syllabus clearly stipulates that "grammar, rhetoric and stylistic knowledge are not included in the examination scope", the new textbook "Instructions" also has "Chinese knowledge essays are arranged at the end of the text", and "students combine reading, The practice of writing and oral communication is free to read and does not require examination." However, in order to comprehensively improve students' Chinese language quality and meet the needs of quality education, middle school Chinese language textbooks must become high-quality publications, with no room for errors. Therefore, it should be corrected as soon as possible