Learn to Read and Write Latin Part II: The Difference Between English and Latin Sentences

In Part I, we learned about where Latin came from and its alphabet. In this lesson we will learn how basic Latin sentence structure differs from English.

The Difference between English and Latin Sentences

All languages used around the world can be broken down into categories depending on the order in which the three most common parts of a sentence appear: the subject, verb, and object. The subject is the thing that does the action in the verb, the verb is the action being done, and the object is the thing to which the action in the verb is done. For example, in the sentence "Tim kicked the ball." Tim is the subject, kicked is the verb, and ball is the object. Since most English sentences follow this pattern, English is said to be a SVO language, or subject-object-verb language.

Latin is generally categorized as a SOV language, or subject-object-verb language. This means that the subject comes first, object comes second, and the verb comes last. So, if our example of "Tim kicked the ball." from above was written with a SOV word order, the sentence would read "Tim the ball kicked." This is the pattern in which most Latin sentences are written, however, it is not completely necessary that Latin stick strictly to this pattern. We will see sentences which are written in the SVO order, but it is generally a helpful rule to look for the verb last in the sentence.

Since Latin does not necessarily stick to the SOV order written above, the language relies on specialized endings to help identify verbs, nouns, and adjectives. The ending of a verb will change depending on the tense, number, and person. Nouns will have different endings depending on if it is singular or plural, and based upon how the noun is used in a sentence: as a subject, direct object, indirect object, etc. Adjectives have different endings depending on the number, gender, and use in the sentence of the noun it modifies. We will soon see the importance of learning these specialized endings, as they are necessary to comprehending Latin sentences which can sometimes look like puzzles.

This lesson will end with one small note about Classical Latin in ancient writing. Romans did not originally use punctuation as we now use it. In fact, they used hardly any punctuation at all. Each sentence was written as one long string of letters; there were no spaces between the words. Most Latin you see written on ancient monuments also heavily uses abbreviation for any words that would be easily recognizable. Eventually punctuation worked its way into written languages over the years. We will use spaces between words and normal English punctuation for all Latin sentences in this guide.

On the next lesson we will start learning about nouns in Latin.