Getting started on Classical Latin

3 The pronunciation of Latin

4 Introducing grammar

4.1 Inflexion

The underlying grammatical rules of Indo-European languages (for example, English, Gaelic, French, German, Russian, Latin, Greek, Punjabi) are similar, but it is not always easy to appreciate this when you are beginning to learn a new language. A common feature of all these languages is the inflexion of nouns, adjectives and verbs, whereby the end of the word is changed according to its function in the sentence. For example, woman, woman's, women and women's are all inflexions of a noun. This and these are inflexions of an adjective, and teach, teaches, teaching and taught are inflexions of a verb.

In English, many of these inflected forms have ceased to be used in the last few centuries, but many languages use them much more than English does. Latin is one of the languages which is heavily inflected. In English, we have exchanged the inflexions on the whole for a very strict system of word order. For example, ‘Those girls are feeding the horses’ means one thing, and ‘The horses are feeding those girls’ something rather different. Similarly, ‘You are going to Spain tomorrow’ is different from ‘Are you going to Spain tomorrow?’ We can tell who is doing what to whom, in the first example, and whether something is a statement or a question, in the second example, from the order of the words.

This is much less true of Latin. The endings of words (the inflexions) are vital in understanding how words relate to each other and enable us to work out the meaning of a sentence. When learning Latin (or Greek, German or Russian), we have to change our reading habits. We need to look even more carefully at the ends of words than at the beginnings, and only if we do this will the meaning of a sentence become clear and unambiguous. In learning Latin, vocabulary is important, but just as important is the system of word endings.