Latin Sentence Structure

Now that the history of Latin and its alphabet and pronunciation are out of the way, we can get to the language itself.

Let's think about English first. The sentence "The girl greets the boy" is different from "The boy greets the girl." The difference is made possible by the order of the words in the sentence. English expects that each word will be in a certain place in the sentence depending on its function in that sentence. English students are taught that for a sentence to make sense, it must be structured like [noun] [verb] [direct object] [indirect object and/or preposition], or at very least, [noun] [verb]. "Billy jumps" makes sense to us. "Jumps Billy" only makes sense in a poetic context where meter is of the essence.

In Latin, each word has an ending that determines its grammatical function in its clause or sentence. As such, we don't need sentence structure to tell us what the words in the sentence are doing -- the words are doing that job themselves. Latin sentence structure is incredibly flexible.

Let's do some examples:

1. We could say puella salit, where puella means girl (in the sense that the girl is doing the action described the verb) and salit means he/she/it jumps or he/she/it is jumping. Together we get "a/the girl jumps" or "a/the girl is jumping." Notice that Latin (for the most part) does not include articles like a, an, or the, so the right article to use is determined by context.

However, we can switch out these words. We can say salit puella and it still means "a/the girl jumps" or "a/the girl is jumping."

2. We can say puella puerum salutat, where puella still means girl (in the sense that the girl is committing the verb), puerum means boy (in the sense that the boy is having the verb committed on him), and salutat means he/she/it greets or he/she/it is greeting. We then get "A/the girl greets a/the boy" or "A/the girl is greeting a/the boy."

Puella will always be the one doing the action and puerum will always receive the action. Therefore, we can write puerum puella salutat, or salutat puerum puella, or salutat puella puerum, or puella salutat puerum, and so forth and it will always mean "A/the girl is greeting a/the boy" or "A/the girl greets a/the boy."

3. Because verbs have endings and forms which contain information, Latin can have sentences that simply contain a verb. If we've been talking about a girl, we can say "salutat," and we can infer that it means "She greets."

Latin authors will change the sentence order for various reasons. If they're writing poetry, they may change the order to better fit the poetic meter. Perhaps they want to emphasize a particular word by putting it at the beginning.

While there is no set-in-stone rule for Latin sentence structure, one convention used (particularly in an educational setting) is to use the order [noun] [direct object] [indirect object and/or preposition] [verb].