The following article originally appeared in Fontes, the internal Classics and Ancient History magazine of Winchester College.
Although word order in Latin is not as crucial to communication as with modern languages, it is nonetheless important. Random Yoda like the word order not is. Rather, the order of words is carefully chosen by the author, when not blindly following convention, to punctuate their sentences, to clarify their meaning, to emphasise their words, and to complement their style.
Convention: some conventions are followed by almost all Latin writers. Prepositions predictably always precede nouns. Sentences generally follow the form subject-object-verb. Adverbs and dependent infinitives precede the final verb. Some verbs (imperatives, those in the vivid present tense and ‘sum’) are frequently found at the beginning of sentences. These conventions are followed by writers unquestioningly, often for no other reason than to follow convention.
Punctuation: Latin uses words, instead of our modern-day jumble of abstract symbols, to punctuate its sentences. Postpositive particles, such as "igitur", are the key example. They easily signpost the beginning of sentences and clauses, positioned, as their name suggests, immediately after the first word or phrase. Although each is used in specific situations, the words carry little meaning, much like a colon or a comma, therefore acting primarily as punctuation.
Clarification: word order in some Latin constructions is critical. Indirect statements are an example of this. Both the subject and object of the statement are in the accusative. There is a major difference between "he said that the boy loved the girl" and "he said that the girl loved the boy". Without word order, it would, except of course from context, be impossible to differentiate between these two sentences in Latin. Word order is often used to clarify what a phrase means.
Emphasis: writers often choose words to be in certain positions to draw attention to them. Variations on the usual subject-object-verb word order in prose are for emphasis. Words promoted to the front of a sentence, or slid down to the end, are given the most prominence. If there are more than two words to be emphasised, the Latin spaces them out from one another as far as possible. In English, it is hard to highlight words by varying their order without significantly convoluting the sentence. In Latin, however, it has a smaller effect on communication, and therefore most writers use the technique.
Style: comparisons of Cicero and Caesar's style in regard to word order have been conducted by academics. Rather than comparing individual sentences in which the factors discussed above would play a major role, they looked at the general trends. For example, with both writers, adjectives mostly precede nouns. The only common major exceptions to this are with stock phrases, e.g. 'res publica', where the opposite is almost always the case, and possessive adjectives, which when unemphatic, usually succeed the noun.
The most prominent difference between Caesar and Cicero’s adjective positioning was their cardinal numbers. According to Arthur T. Walker’s “Some Facts of Latin Word-Order” (Jun., 1918), Cicero almost always makes his precede the noun, whereas Caesar only does so roughly half the time. Another significant difference is with 'ipse': in this instance, Caesar's usually precede the noun, whereas Cicero's often succeed it. Proper adjectives (i.e. adjectives formed from proper nouns) succeed their noun more often with Cicero than with Caesar.
Latin word order is more important than it may at first seem. Much like our punctuation: it signposts the beginning and end of sentences and clauses; allows us to clarify meaning; and compliments our style. It blends into the background, only noticed by readers when it obfuscates meaning. Word order is often an afterthought in both composition and translation: however, much like punctuation, it is critically important.
The Wikipedia (and Vicipaedia) article on Latin word order is a good place to start if you wish to discover more about Latin word order, not only for its text, but also for its bibliography:
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