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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. 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 definiteness (where English uses "the" and "a"), topic-comment relationships, the role of adverbs (whether they are descriptive or contrastive), and so on. Outside China, Southeast Asia is home to many analytic languages, such as Thai and Vietnamese.(from Wikipedia)

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