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

Synthetic language

A synthetic language, also called an inflected language, is a language which uses inflectional forms, such as affixes, as a primary means of indicating the grammatical function of the words in the language, often to the point where the word order in a clause is arbitrary or merely connotative. An example of a synthetic language is Latin.

The opposite of a synthetic language is an analytic language, also known as an isolating language, in which the word forms are mostly or totally fixed, and grammatical functions are indicated through the use of helper words and word order. Chinese is an example of an analytic language.

Synthetic languages can be further broken down into agglutinative and fusional categories.

For more information on synthetic languages, please see inflected language.

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