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Comment by utf_8x | Hacker News Reader

TIL the sentence structure of Latin is wild

Latin’s sentence structure is much more flexible than languages such as English. For example, Latin uses cases for nouns to indicate which is the subject and which is the object, whereas English uses word order. This allows Latin sentences to be constructed in various orders without affecting meaning. It also leads to Latin’s reputation for trying the patience of students such as myself (studied for five years at school many years ago).

People might find it interesting to know that English still has remnants of its case system in its personal pronouns, for example I/me/my/mine, he/him/his, she/her/her, who/whom/whose.

Some people struggle with who/whom but in fact it’s the same as “he” versus “him”: if you replace “who” with “he” in the sentence and it sounds wrong then you should be using “whom”.

This is also quite common in some more synthetic languages, like most slavic ones for example.

And the latin case is made muuuch more extreme due to the fact that we read poetry and stuff written in the yambic hexameter, which would have also been quite alien sounding to an average roman citizen on the street.

I remember in school one trick was always to start finding the verb and then use that to build a broader context of the phrase

It’s like passing data around in a list or tuple, versus key-value objects or dictionaries.

the difference, if you're looking to dive deeper into this, is that English is a more analytic language, and Latin is a more synthetic language. In Latin you mostly alter the form of the words to match their meaning. In English you mostly change order and add auxiliary words to change meaning. I'm qualifying these with "mostly" because nothing is all one way or all another, generally.

Word order does matter a bit in Latin, but much less than it does in English. "Dog bites man" and "man bites dog" are different due to word order. In Latin you can write "canis hominem mordet" in _any_ order and have it mean "dog bites man" because that's the only thing those nouns in those cases can mean. To do "man bites dog" you have to say "homo canem mordet" (again, in any order). Conventionally, though, you end a sentence or a subordinate clause with its verb, and the subject that matches up with a verb is usually the one closest to space-wise.

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