There are some synthetic forms in Modern English. Why do we say that the Modern English language is an analytical language?

Old English is frequently presented as a synthetic language, a language in which grammatical function of clause elements is primarily derived from inflections rather than from word order and prepositions, while Present Day English is said to be the opposite, and analytic language. Old English has an extensive system of inflections concerning most word classes, and often it is perfectly possible to rely on these, rather than word order and prepositions, to denote grammatical function. In looking at the array of languages which currently populate the Earth, one will find few languages that are entirely analytic or entirely synthetic.

English is more analytic than it is synthetic. Old English, its distant predecessor, was more synthetic than analytic, meaning that the structure of its sentences had room to vary more widely and that the language used suffixes to convey concepts like number, gender, case, tense, and so forth. This process- adding suffixes, prefixes, or else changing the root- to specify such contexts is known as "inflection".

Synthetic languages use a great deal of inflection. Our language retains some inflection, most notably in the form of personal endings-

I run, You run, He/she run(s), We run, They run, The (s) is a personal ending and it specifies that the verb modifies a third person singular pronoun (He/she/it/etc.).

English is a analytic language. There is only very little inflection and word order is very important for understanding the meaning.

All languages, however, tend to move slowly from synthetic, to analytic. English started as a synthetic language with a lot of inflection. Slowly, it dropped the inflection and started using word order as a means of distinguishing the meaning. The Czech language is still in the beginning of this process with its seven cases and many different verb forms. Spanish is now somewhere in between, having different verb forms but the same noun forms, and English has gone far from the synthetic into the analytic.

Every nominal part of speech was declinable; verbs were conjugable, for example: the adjective had the plural form OE зod (singular), зode (plural). Why didn’t the plural ending reach the Modern English language?

The English language changed enormously during the Middle English period, both in grammar and in vocabulary. While Old English is a heavily inflected language (synthetic), an overall diminishing of grammatical endings occurred in Middle English (analytic). Grammar distinctions were lost as many noun and adjective endings were leveled to -e. The older plural noun marker -en largely gave way to -s, and grammatical gender was discarded. Approximately 10,000 French (and Norman) loan words entered Middle English, particularly terms associated with government, church, law, the military, fashion, and food. English spelling was also influenced by Norman in this period, with the /θ/ and /ð/ sounds being spelled th rather than with the Old English letters þ (thorn) and ð (eth), which did not exist in Norman. These letters remain in the modern Icelandic alphabet, having been borrowed from Old English via Western Norwegian.
For centuries following the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Norman kings and high-ranking nobles in England and to some extent elsewhere in the British Isles spoke Anglo-Norman, a variety of Old Norman, originating from a northern langue d'oïl dialect. Merchants and lower-ranked nobles were often bilingual in Anglo-Norman and English, whilst English continued to be the language of the common people. Middle English was influenced by both Anglo-Norman and, later, Anglo-French (see characteristics of the Anglo-Norman language).

52. Some of the nouns were declined according to n-stem declension, for example: ox – oxen. Why didn’t the ending of n-stem declension reach the Modern English language?
At the beginning of the Middle English period, which dates from the Norman Conquest of1066, the language was still inflectional; at the end of the period the relationship between theelements of the sentence depended basically on word order. As early as 1200 the three or fourgrammatical case forms of nouns in the singular had been reduced to two, and to denote theplural the noun ending -es had been adopted.

The declension of the noun was simplified further by dropping the final n from five cases of the fourth, or weak, declension; by neutralizing all vowel endings to e (sounded like the a in Modern English sofa), and by extending the masculine, nominative, and accusative plural ending -as, later neutralized also to -es, to other declensions and other cases. Only one example of a weak plural ending, oxen, survives in Modern English; kine and brethren are later formations. Several representatives of the Old English modification of the root vowel in the plural, such as man, men, and foot, feet, survive also.

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