Is Modern English a highly inflected synthetic language?

No, Modern English is not a highly inflected synthetic language. It is considered an analytic language, meaning it relies primarily on word order and function words (prepositions, articles, etc.) to convey grammatical relationships, rather than inflectional endings.

Here's why:

* Limited Inflection: English verbs have limited inflections, mostly for tense (e.g., walk, walked, walking) and person/number (e.g., I walk, she walks). Nouns only have two forms: singular and plural (e.g., cat, cats).

* Word Order: English heavily relies on word order to convey meaning. For example, "The dog chased the cat" is different from "The cat chased the dog." This is a key characteristic of analytic languages.

* Function Words: English uses a significant number of function words like prepositions (on, in, to), articles (a, the), and conjunctions (and, but) to clarify grammatical relationships.

Synthetic languages, on the other hand, rely heavily on inflectional endings to convey grammatical information. For example, in Latin, the ending of a word can indicate its case, number, gender, and even tense.

While English has some elements of inflection, it is far less inflected than many other languages and relies more heavily on word order and function words. Therefore, it is considered an analytic language.