Analytic language

The term analytic is commonly used in a relative rather than an absolute sense. The most prominent and widely used Indo-European analytic language is Modern English, which has lost much of the inflectional morphology that it inherited from Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Germanic and Old English over the centuries and has not gained any new inflectional morphemes in the meantime, which makes it more analytic than most other Indo-European languages. For example, Proto-Indo-European had much more complex grammatical conjugation, grammatical genders, dual number and inflections for eight or nine cases in its nouns, pronouns, adjectives, numerals, participles, postpositions and determiners. Standard English has lost nearly all of them (except for three modified cases for pronouns) along with genders and dual number and simplified its conjugation. Latin, German, Greek, and Russian and a majority of the Slavic languages, characterized by free word order, are synthetic languages. Nouns in Russian inflect for at least six cases, most of which descended from Proto-Indo-European cases, whose functions English translates by instead using other strategies like prepositions, verbal voice, word order, and possessive ''''. Modern Hebrew is more analytic than Classical Hebrew mostly with nouns. Classical Hebrew relies heavily on inflectional morphology to convey grammatical relationships, while in Modern Hebrew, there has been a significant reduction of the use of inflectional morphology. ==Isolating language==

A related concept is that of isolating languages, which are those with a low morpheme-per-word ratio (taking into account derivational morphemes as well). Purely isolating languages are by definition analytic and lack inflectional morphemes. However, the reverse is not necessarily true, and a language can have derivational morphemes but lack inflectional morphemes. For example, Mandarin Chinese has many compound words, which gives it a moderately high ratio of morphemes per word, but since it has almost no inflectional affixes at all to convey grammatical relationships; it is a very analytic language. English is not totally analytic in its nouns, since it uses inflections for number (e.g., "one day, three days; one boy, four boys") and possession ("The boy's ball" vis-à-vis "The boy has a ball"). Mandarin Chinese, by contrast, has no inflections on its nouns: Compare 'one day', 'three days' (literally 'three day'); 'one boy' (lit. 'one [entity of] male child'), 'four boys' (lit. 'four [entity of] male child'). However, English is considered weakly inflected, and comparatively more analytic than most other Indo-European languages. Persian is a synthetic language, not an analytical one. It has some features of agglutination, making use of prefixes and suffixes attached to the stems of verbs and nouns, thus making it a synthetic language rather than an analytic one. It is also an SOV (subject, object, and then verb) language, thus having a head-final phrase structure. Example in Persian: Kuchiktarinhayeshunra barnemigardundam meaning I wouldn’t return the smallest ones of them (literally 'Small+diminutive+comparative+superlative+plural+possessive+object_marker re+not+ing+turn+to+did+I') == List of analytic languages ==

Synthetic languages that encounter heavy influence, or become creolized, often become more analytic, as the complex rules of synthesis break down. Thus, many of these languages are ones like English or Mandarin that became a significant admixture of more than one language (with English, this includes Old English, Norman French, Latin, and Old Norse), or which are new languages made from earlier ones, like Haitian Creole. • Indo-European languages • Germanic languages • Afrikaans • Dutch (partially) • Danish • English (mostly) • Norwegian • Swedish • Others • Bulgarian (partially) • French (partially) • Lao • Hmong-Mien languages • Hmong • Maybrat • Mixtec • Sango • Yoruba ==See also==