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.