An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics

A language that is characterized largely by the fact that it depends on word order, rather than on inflections (grammatical endings), to convey sentence meanings. In an analytic language relations between nouns and adjectives are expressed using prepositions. English and (to a lesser extent) French, and Persian are considered analytic languages, while German and Russian are → synthetic languages.

See also: → analytic; → language.