Huh. I was taught the spectrum slightly differently, with analytic, agglutinative and synthetic as three points, if I remember, going in a sort of circle (it's been a couple of years). But we were talking about how languages shift from one type to another over time, so that probably explains it (wow, I need to study).<br><br>Also in my head I consider English analytic even if its technically not, just because we talk a lot about the difference between Old and later Englishes - OE being actually properly synthetic, so 'the shift from analytic to synthetic' is useful shorthand there.<br><br>Tying this back to last week, I kind of think this is why English is so ambiguous - because it has so little inflection and the like, there aren't giant VERB PHRASE HERE signs about the place. But I don't actually know, as I don't speak any other languages and even if I did, I don't know how you would quantify this so you could study the correlation.,(reply>), in general, of course, the Endlish is the analytic and "isolating" language.<br>I.E. are, in general,  flexional-synthetic languages.  the Old English was the same.,(reply>), " going in a sort of circle" - it's just a hypothesis, the speculation only, this part of that theory.