Word Order - Latin and English Differences in Word Order

Speakers of English are used to putting the subject of the sentence at the beginning of the sentence, the verb in the middle, and the direct and indirect object at the end (SVO = Subject + Verb + Object), as in

(1)Man bites dog,

which means something entirely different from

(2)Dog bites man.

When learning Latin, one of the obstacles to overcome is the word order, since it is rarely SVO. In Latin it is often SOV or OVS or OV, with the verb at the end and the subject included in it. [This is an important point: A Latin verb can tell you the subject of the clause/sentence or it can tell you much of what you need to know about the subject of the sentence.] At any rate, it wouldn't matter whether the dog or mailman came first, because who did the biting would always be clear.

(3)canem________ vir_____________ mordet
dog-acc_sg.(object) man-nom._sg.(subject) bites-3d_sg.
man bites dog

(4)vir_____________ canem________ mordet = (3)
man-nom._sg.(subject) dog-acc_sg.(object) bites-3d_sg.
man bites dog

But

(5)canis___________ virum___________ mordet
dog-nom_sg.(subject) man-acc._sg.(object) bites-3d_sg.
dog bites man

Although English has a fixed word order, it is not entirely foreign to us to find the words in an order other than SVO. When we utter a sentence in the imperative, like an order, we put the verb first:

(6)Beware of dog!

Incidentally, the Latin imperative can have the same order:

(7)Cave canem!
beware dog

This word order is VO (Verb-Object) with no stated subject. An English question has the verb first, too (even if it is an auxiliary), and the object last, as in

(8)Will the dog bite the man?

The point of these examples is that we are able to understand sentences that are not SVO.

The reason Latin is a more flexible language in terms of word order is that what English speakers encode by position in the sentence, Latin handles with case endings at the ends of nouns, adjectives, and verbs. English word order tells us that what is the subject is the (set of) word(s) that comes first in a declarative sentence, what is the object is the set of words at the sentence end, and what is the verb separates subject from object. We rarely confuse verb with noun, except in ambiguous cases like Bart Simpson's

(9)What has 4 legs and ticks?

There is ambiguity in Latin, as well, but most of the time, an ending will show, just as efficiently, what is the subject, what is the object, and what is the verb.

(10)omnia______________ vincit______________ amor
everything-acc._pl._neut. conquers-3d_pers._sg. love-nom._sg._masc.
'Love conquers all.' (Attributed to Vergil.)

Please let me know if I've made an error.

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