morph

Little plasticine guy (should be under people...) who appeared on English children's television programmes about art with Tony Hart, Mr. Bennett, and a regularly changed female co-artist.

Arch enemy/ best friend was another plasticine guy called Chas.

Note: Mr. Bennett is not the same as Tony Bennett, who appeared at 1998's Glastonbury Festival.

1. A hemaphrodite. 2. Morphine.

- american underworld dictionary - 1950

A computer graphics algorithm which performs a rubber-sheet (aka "warp") transformation to take one visual "source" rendering (normally a bitmap image) into another "target" rendering, calculating several intermediate renderings along the process. Usually, values for object colors are interpolated (aka "cross-dissolved")for the intermediate frames, as well as their virtual positions.

The source rendering, the intermediate renderings, and the target are usually shown as a time sequence (that is, like the frames of a video) so that the source image appears to continuously metamorphose into the target.

The rubber-sheet transformation requires several control points on the source and target renderings to be defined and then associated with each other. This generally requires human intervention, making the technique reatively more expensive than others.

Morphing technology was invented by Douglas B. Smythe of Industrial Light and Magic, the special effects arm of Lucasfilm, Inc. The first morph appeared in the movie Willow.

As people began to become familiar with the effect, rather than startled or nauseated, the advertising industry picked up the technology and ran it into the ground. As far as visual effects go, morphing is now a cliché.

In linguistics, a morph is a single indivisible piece carrying meaning or grammatical content. For example, in The children are playing, the six morphs are The, child-, -ren, are, play, -ing. Two of them (child, play) have a definite semantic content, and the other four are syntactic.

The affix -ing is a simple morph: the grammatical sense of continuous action is always carried by this morph.

The plural of nouns is however carried by different morphs: usually -s or -es, but in a few words -en or -ren, or zero (sheep), or vowel change (men, child-). These are all allomorphs of the one morpheme, "noun plural".

The morpheme is a high-level or "emic" concept, like an equivalence class in mathematics or a chemical element. The morph is a low-level or "etic" concept, like an allotrope of an element. Similarly in phonetics, there are phonemes, which are classes of phones grouped into allophones.

Words might not be neatly divisible into morphs. For example, men contains both the semantic part man and the morphological process of vowel change to mark plural. Two morphemes are represented by one morph. We call them two morphemes for regularity, because most other plurals do have two overt morphs.

The study of morphs and morphemes is morphology.