Isolating Language - Analytic Languages

Analytic Languages

An analytic language is a language that conveys grammatical relationships syntactically — that is, via the use of unbound morphemes, which are separate words, rather than via bound morphemes, which are inflectional prefixes, suffixes or infixes. If a language is isolating, with only a single morpheme per word, then by necessity it must convey grammatical relationships analytically.

However, the reverse is not always true: for example, Mandarin Chinese can be argued to have many compound words, giving it a moderately high ratio of morphemes per word, yet since it does not use inflections to convey grammatical relationships it is an analytic language.

It is also possible that a language may have virtually no inflectional morphology but have a larger number of derivational affixes. For example, Indonesian has only two inflectional affixes but about 25 derivational morphemes. With only two inflectional affixes, Indonesian can be considered mostly analytic.

The term "analytic" is commonly used in a relative rather than an absolute sense. For example, English is less inflectional and thus more analytic than most Indo-European languages. (For example, it uses an auxiliary verb in "would be" whereas in Romance languages this would be expressed as a single inflected word, such as the Spanish "estaría," "estarías," "estaríamos," "estaríais," "estarían," "estaba," "estabas," "estábamos," "estabais," "estaban," "estoy," "estás," "está," "estamos," "estáis," or "están"; and it uses prepositions where most Slavic languages use declensional inflections). However, English is also not totally analytic as it does use inflections (for example, choose / chose / chosen / choosing); Mandarin Chinese has, by comparison, no inflections: "I go to shop today.", "I go to shop tomorrow.", "I go to shop yesterday."