Editing Analytic language (section)

==Background==
The term ''analytic'' is commonly used in [[synthetic language#Synthetic and analytic languages|a relative rather than an absolute sense]]. The most prominent and widely used [[Indo-European]] analytic language is [[Modern English]], which has lost much of the [[inflectional morphology]] that it inherited from [[Proto-Indo-European]], [[Proto-Germanic]] and [[Old English]] over the centuries and has not gained any new inflectional morphemes in the meantime, which makes it more analytic than most other Indo-European languages.

For example, Proto-Indo-European had much more complex [[grammatical conjugation]], [[grammatical gender]]s, [[dual (grammatical number)|dual number]] and inflections for eight or nine [[Grammatical case|cases]] in its [[noun]]s, [[pronoun]]s, [[adjective]]s, [[numeral (linguistics)|numeral]]s, [[participle]]s, [[postposition]]s and [[determiner]]s. Standard English has lost nearly all of them (except for three modified cases for [[pronoun]]s) along with genders and dual number and simplified its conjugation.

[[Latin]], [[German language|German]], [[Greek language|Greek]], and [[Russian language|Russian]] and a majority of the [[Slavic languages]], characterized by free [[word order]], are [[synthetic languages]]. [[Russian grammar#Nouns|Nouns in Russian]] inflect for at least six cases, most of which descended from Proto-Indo-European cases, whose functions English translates by instead using other strategies like [[preposition]]s, [[Voice (grammar)|verbal voice]], word order, and [[English possessive|possessive ''{{'s}}'']].

[[Modern Hebrew]] is more analytic than [[Classical Hebrew]] mostly with nouns.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Zuckermann |first1=Ghil'ad |title=Hybridity versus Revivability: Multiple Causation, Forms and Patterns |journal=Journal of Language Contact |date=2009 |volume=2 |issue=2 |pages=40–67 |doi=10.1163/000000009792497788 }}</ref> Classical Hebrew relies heavily on inflectional [[Morphology (linguistics)|morphology]] to convey [[Grammaticality|grammatical]] relationships, while in Modern Hebrew, there has been a significant reduction of the use of inflectional morphology.