The CBB

I was about to post this in the quick Q&A thread, but I think it would be more interesting to make a more lengthy discussion of it.

Simple question: What are the components that build up a word?

Explanation: I know that a lot of words are built up of word roots. Many have affixes to modify the way the roots define the meaning of a word, and sometimes, words are made up of pre-existing words. What else is there? Do some languages have distinct features depending on what type of word it is (noun, verb etc.)? What about groups of words that fit into a sequence or order (baby, child, adult etc. or small, medium, large etc.)? What about nominalisations? I'm not looking for a yes or no to each of these; I'm after interesting explanations of how things like these are done (or not done) in other languages, natural or otherwise. "French does this one"... ok, explain! I'm interested.

I'm in a very eager-to-learn-interesting-s*** mood at the moment so thanks for any interesting s*** you can tell us about .
I'm also stuck with vocab (again) and am looking for ideas, but that's beside the point.

From reading the thread title, I thought this was going to be a discussion about feet, syllables and morae

gestaltist wrote:From reading the thread title, I thought this was going to be a discussion about feet, syllables and morae

Sorry to have disappointed you, but that's an interesting topic too, you could start another thread to have interesting discussions about that maybe?

You may wish to take a look at Hebrew 1- and 2-letter roots. Here is a simple lexicon to start from (Jeff Benner's)

One of the easiest letters to understand is mem (M), meaning a large quantity or continuum of something, such as (probably) in mayīm מים 'water', 'water course', am עם 'people' and m(ə).od מאד 'abundance'.