Analytic language An analytic language is a language that organizes words and grammar by a strict word order instead of inflections, or word endings that show grammar. Examples of analytic languages include Chinese, English, Vietnamese, Thai, Khmer, and Lao. In Chinese, sentences are mostly in the SVO (subject-verb-object) word order. So the sentence must be "I eat noodles", not "I noodles eat" or "eat I noodles". In Chinese this is written as 我吃面条. The verb 吃 (pronounced chī, meaning: "eat") does not change based on the subject "I" or the object "noodles", and likewise the subject 我 (pronounced wǒ, meaning: "I") and object 面条 (pronounced miàntiáo, meaning: "noodle/noodles") do not have any special word endings based on its role or number. What is important is that all the words are in the correct order. Modern English does have some inflections based on the subject (the verb "eat" becomes "eats" when the subject is a third person "he/she/it") and number ("noodle" is singular while "noodles" is plural), but aside from that, there are almost none. Therefore, Modern English is mostly an analytic language. An analytic language is a type of natural language that uses affixes very rarely but in which a series of root/stem words is accompanied by prepositions, postpositions, particles and modifiers. This is opposed to synthetic languages, which synthesize many concepts into a single word, using affixes regularly. In an analytic language, syntactic roles are assigned to words primarily by word order. For example, in English, the sentences "the cat caught the fish" and "the fish caught the cat" have different meanings, expressed by different word orders. This can be contrasted with a synthetic language such as Latin, in which the same difference in meaning can be expressed by changing the individual words while keeping the same word order: "fēlis piscem cēpit" means 'the cat caught the fish', while "fēlem piscis cēpit" means 'the fish caught the cat'. Typically, analytic languages have a low morpheme-per-word ratio, especially with respect to inflectional morphemes. No natural language, however, is purely analytic or purely synthetic. 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 like English or Mandarin in being significant admixtures of more than one language (with English, these languages include Old English, Norman French, Latin and Old Norse); or are new languages made from earlier ones, like Haitian Creole. Indo-European languages Germanic languages Afrikaans Danish Dutch (partially) English (mostly) Norwegian Swedish Others Bulgarian (partially) French (partially) Haitian Creole Kalto Austronesian languages Cham Hawaiian Māori Sino-Tibetan languages Burmese Sinitic languages Classical Chinese Cantonese Mandarin Austroasiatic languages Khmer Vietnamese Kra-Dai languages Lao Thai Hmong-Mien languages Hmong Maybrat Mixtec Sango Yoruba

this in modern English: Rarely have I seen ... However, V2 order was much more extensive in Old English. In subordinate clauses, the word order is less The grammar of Old English differs greatly from Modern English, predominantly being much more inflected. As a Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system similar to that of the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as th Hēr Cynewulf benam Sigebryht his rīces ond westseaxna wiotan for unryhtum dǣdum, būton Hamtūnscīre; ... (Literally) "Here Cynewulf deprived Sigebryht of his kingdom and West Saxons' counselors for unright deeds, except Hampshire" (translated) "Here Cynewulf and the West Saxon counselors deprived Sigebryht of his kingdom, other than Hampshire, for unjust actions" The words ond westseaxna wiotan "and the West Saxon counselors" (lit. "and (the) counselors of (the) West Saxons") have been extraposed from (moved out of) the compound subject they belong in, in a way that would be impossible in modern English. In Old English, case inflection preserves the meaning: the verb beniman "to deprive" (appearing in this sentence in the form benam, "[he] deprived") needs a word in the genitive case to show what someone or something is deprived of, which in this sentence is rīces "of kingdom" (nominative rīce, "kingdom"), whereas wiotan "counselors" is in the nominative case and therefore serves a different role entirely (the genitive of it would be wiotana, "of counselors"); for this reason the interpretation that Cynewulf deprived Sigebryht of the West Saxon counselors was not possible for speakers of Old English. The Old English sentence is in theory ambiguous, as it contains one more word in the genitive: westseaxna ("of West Saxons", nominative westseaxan "West Saxons"), and the form wiotan "counselors" may also represent the accusat The word "the" was used very much like in Modern English. The main difference is that it was used somewhat more sparingly, due to numerous groups of nouns which usually went without it. These include: Whilst most Old English texts have the accusative and dative pronouns in the first and The default word order was verb-second; this resembles modern German or Dutch more than Modern English. There was no do-support in questions and negatives. Multiple negatives could stack up in a sentence and intensified each other (negative concord). Sentences with subordinate clauses of the type "When X, Y" did not use a wh-type word for the conjunction but used a th-type correlative conjunction (e.g., þā X, þā Y instead of "When X, Y"). Hēr Cynewulf benam Sigebryht his rīces ond westseaxna wiotan for unryhtum dǣdum, būton Hamtūnscīre; ... (Literally) "Here Cynewulf deprived Sigebryht of his kingdom and West Saxons' counselors for unright deeds, except Hampshire" (translated) "Here Cynewulf and the West Saxon counselors deprived Sigebryht of his kingdom, other than Hampshire, for unjust actions" The words ond westseaxna wiotan "and the West Saxon counselors" (lit. "and (the) counselors of (the) West Saxons") have been extraposed from (moved out of) the compound subject they belong in, in a way that would be impossible in modern English. In Old English, case inflection preserves the meaning: the verb beniman "to deprive" (appearing in this sentence in the form benam, "[he] deprived") needs a word in the genitive case to show what someone or something is deprived of, which in this sentence is rīces "of kingdom" (nominative rīce, "kingdom"), whereas wiotan "counselors" is in the nominative case and therefore serves a different role entirely (the genitive of it would be wiotana, "of counselors"); for this reason the interpretation that Cynewulf deprived Sigebryht of the West Saxon counselors was not possible for speakers of Old English. The Old English sentence is in theory ambiguous, as it contains one more word in the genitive: westseaxna ("of West Saxons", nominative westseaxan "West Saxons"), and the form wiotan "counselors" may also represent the accusative case in addition to the nominative, thus for example creating the grammatical possibility of the interpretation that Cynewulf also took the West Saxons away from the counselors, but this would have been difficult to conceive. Main clauses in Old English tend to have a verb-second (V2) order, where the finite verb is the second constituent in a sentence, regardless of what comes first. There are vestigial examples of this in modern English: Rarely have I seen ... However, V2 order was much more extensive in Old English. In subordinate clauses, the word order is less restricted, with both verb-second and verb-final word order occurring, though verb-final is more common. Furthermore, in poetry, the rules of prose are frequently broken. In Beowulf, for example, main clauses frequently have verb-initial or verb-final order, recalling earlier stages of Old English syntax. (However, in clauses introduced by þā, which can mean either "when" or "then", and where word order is crucial for telling the difference, the normal word order is nearly always followed.) Linguists who work within the Chomskyan transformational grammar paradigm often believe that it is more accurate to describe Old English (and other Germanic languages with the same word-order patterns like modern German) as having underlying subject-object-verb (SOV) ordering. According to this theory, all sentences are initially generated using this order, but in main clauses, the verb is moved back to the V2 position (technically, the verb undergoes V-to-T raising). That is said to explain the fact that Old English allows inversion of subject and verb as a general strategy for forming questions, while modern English uses this strategy almost only with auxiliary verbs and the main verb "to be", requiring do-support in other cases.