Concept
In linguistic typology, an analytic language is one that conveys relationships between words in sentences primarily by way of helper words (particles, prepositions, etc.) and word order, as opposed to using inflections (changing the form of a word to convey its role in the sentence). For example, the English-language phrase "The cat chases the ball" conveys the fact that the cat is acting on the ball analytically via word order. This can be contrasted to synthetic languages, which rely heavily on inflections to convey word relationships (e.g., the phrases "The cat chases the ball" and "The cat chased the ball" convey different time frames via changing the form of the word chase). Most languages are not purely analytic, but many rely primarily on analytic syntax. Typically, analytic languages have a low morpheme-per-word ratio, especially with respect to inflectional morphemes. A grammatical construction can similarly be analytic if it uses unbound morphemes, which are separate words, or word order. Analytic languages rely more heavily on the use of definite and indefinite articles (which tend to be less prominently used or absent in strongly synthetic languages), stricter word order, various prepositions, postpositions, particles, modifiers, and context. 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.