Latin Grammar

Latin Grammar

The grammar of Latin, like that of other ancient Indo-European languages, is highly inflected; consequently, it allows for a large degree of flexibility in choosing word order. For example, femina togam texuit, "the woman wove a toga," which is the preferred word order, could be expressed as texuit togam femina or togam texuit femina. In each word the suffix: -a, -am and -uit, and not the position in the sentence, marks the word's grammatical function. Word order, however, is generally subject–object–verb, although variations on this are especially common in poetry and express subtle nuances in prose.

In Latin, there are five declensions of nouns and four conjugations of verbs (although some words are inflected according to irregular patterns). Latin does not have articles and so does not generally differentiate between, for example, "a girl" and "the girl": puella amat means both "a girl loves" and "the girl loves". Latin uses prepositions, and usually places adjectives after nouns. The language can also omit pronouns in certain situations, meaning that the form of the verb alone is generally sufficient to identify the agent; pronouns are most often reserved for situations where meaning is not entirely clear. Latin exhibits verb-framing, in which the path of motion is encoded into the verb rather than in a separate word or phrase; e.g., exit (a compound of ex and it) means "he/she/it goes out."