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| Linguistic typology |
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Ananalytic language is a type ofnatural language that usesaffixes very rarely but in which a series of root/stem words is accompanied byprepositions,postpositions,particles, andmodifiers. This is opposed tosynthetic languages, which synthesize many concepts into a single word, using affixes regularly.
Syntactic roles are assigned to words primarily byword order. For example, by changing the individual words in theLatin phrase "fēl-is pisc-em cēpit" ("the cat caught the fish") to "fēl-em pisc-is cēpit" ("the fish caught the cat"), the fish becomes the subject, while the cat becomes the object. This transformation is not possible in an analytic language without altering the word order. Typically, analytic languages have a lowmorpheme-per-word ratio, especially with respect toinflectional morphemes.
No natural language, however, is purely analytic or purely synthetic.
The termanalytic is commonly used ina relative rather than an absolute sense. The most prominent and widely usedIndo-European analytic language isModern English, which has lost much of theinflectional morphology that it inherited fromProto-Indo-European,Proto-Germanic andOld 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 complexgrammatical conjugation,grammatical genders,dual number and inflections for eight or ninecases in itsnouns,pronouns,adjectives,numerals,participles,postpositions anddeterminers. Standard English has lost nearly all of them (except for three modified cases forpronouns) along with genders and dual number and simplified its conjugation.
Latin,German,Greek, andRussian and a majority of theSlavic languages, characterized by freeword order, aresynthetic 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 likeprepositions,verbal voice, word order, andpossessive's.
Modern Hebrew is more analytic thanClassical Hebrew mostly with nouns.[1] Classical Hebrew relies heavily on inflectionalmorphology to conveygrammatical relationships, while in Modern Hebrew, there has been a significant reduction of the use of inflectional morphology.
A related concept is that ofisolating languages, which are those with a low morpheme-per-word ratio (taking into accountderivational 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 manycompound words,[2] 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一天yī tiān 'one day',三天sān tiān 'three days' (literally 'three day');一個男孩yī ge nánhái 'one boy' (lit. 'one [entity of] male child'),四個男孩sì ge nánhái 'four boys' (lit. 'four [entity of] male child'). However, English is considered weakly inflected, and comparatively more analytic than most otherIndo-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.[3] 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')
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Synthetic languages that encounter heavy influence, or becomecreolized, 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 includesOld English,Norman French,Latin, andOld Norse), or which are new languages made from earlier ones, like Haitian Creole.
In the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries the Bulgarian language changed significantly, developing an analytic grammatical structure.
