The Analytic language reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Analytic language

An analytic language (or isolating language) is a language in which the vast majority of morphemes are free morphemes and considered to be full-fledged "words". By contrast, in a synthetic language, a word is composed of agglutinated or fused morphemes that denote its syntactic meanings.

Chinese (of all dialects) is perhaps the best-known analytic language. To illustrate:

 我      的       朋友     他/她    们     都   要    吃    蛋

 wǒ     de    péngyou    tā    men   dōu  yào  chī  dàn  

 I  possessive friend, he/she plural all want  eat  egg

 "My friends all want to eat eggs."

As can be seen, each syllable (or sometimes two) corresponds to a single concept. Comparing the Chinese to the English translation, one sees that while English itself is fairly analytic, it contains some agglutinative features, such as the bound morpheme -/s/ to mark either possession (in the form of a clitic) or number (in the form of a suffix).

Outside China, Southeast Asia is home to many analytic languages, such as Thai and Vietnamese.

When compared with a synthetic language, such as German, the contrast becomes clear:

Der Mann	Die Männer
the.masculine man.singular	the.masculine.plural man.plural

Note that the morpheme "Der" corresponds to three separate concepts simultaneously, and the morpheme "Die" refers to three concepts, but the rules relating "der" and "die" in this manner are quite arbitrary¹, making this set of morphemes fusional in nature. Furthermore, the word "Männer" corresponds to two concepts and relates to "Mann" through both the plural marker /-Er/ and a process of umlaut that changes "a" to "ä" in many German plurals. Thus, the formation of German plurals is a simple, rule-governed inflectional pattern. As a result, German can be said to lie between the agglutinative and fusional areas of the spectrum of language typology.

¹It is worth mentioning that "die" also can function as a feminine singular definite article!

Features of analytic languages

Analytic languages often express abstract concepts using independent words, while synthetic languages tend to use adpositions, affixes and internal modifications of roots for the same purpose.

Analytic languages have stricter and more elaborate syntactic rules. Since words are not marked by morphology showing their role in the sentence, word order tends to carry a lot of importance; for example, Chinese and English make use of word order to show subject-object relationship. Chinese also uses word order to show definitiveness (where English uses "the" and "a"), topic-comment relationships, the role of adverbs (whether they are descriptive or contrastive), and so on.

Analytic languages tend to rely heavily on context and pragmatic considerations for the interpretation of sentences, since they don't specify as much as synthetic languages in terms of agreement and cross-reference between different parts of the sentence.

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