2.2 A Latin headline

It is usually quite easy in English to work out who is doing what to whom. The girl kicked the ball, the tiger ate the steak, a clown with a big red nose scared the children, the scientist fell asleep. In each of these cases, the person or animal performing an action comes before the verb, the people or thing acted upon come after the verb, and in some cases, like with the last example the scientist fell asleep, there is nothing to be acted upon. The sentence just describes the subject's state of being.

This is the pattern for most English sentences, but not all languages use word order in the same way. We're going to compare the way English tells us who does with what happens in Latin. Latin was the language of the ancient Romans and of medieval Christianity. It evolved over many centuries and developed into many languages still used today, including Italian, Spanish, French, Catalan and Romanian, but nobody speaks only Latin as their own language today.

Let's consider again, the newspaper headline Man Bites dog! In Latin, you would say homo mordet canem, man bites dog. In fact, canis is where the word canine comes from.

To express the opposite, dog bites man, we would say, canis mordet hominem. We can see the verb mordet bites is the same in both sentences but if you look at the word for dog, it is canis when it's a subject and canem when it's the object, when it's the one being bitten. We have a different ending to the word because it is in a different grammatical case. The subject form is canis and the object form is canem. You can see the same thing happening with the word of a man. Homo is a subject form and hominem is the object.

This is because Latin is an inflected language where word endings change to show grammatical properties. English in fact used to be like this about 1,000 years ago in Anglo-Saxon times, but it's lost pretty much all of its inflections on nouns apart from indicating the plural by adding an s and adding an apostrophe s to show possession. But in Latin, you have these inflectional morphemes on all nouns and adjectives.

One consequence of Latin having all these inflections is that you can put the words in Latin in almost any order and the meaning will stay the same. Canem homo mordet, mordet homo canem, mordet canem homo. These all mean the same, the dog is the one that is bitten.

This feature of Latin means that word order was much freer in Latin than in English. For example, an adjective could be separated from the noun it described. This was useful for Roman poets who could play around with word order but it has been tricky for those learning Latin to get used to.

In English of course, word order is much more restricted and in most cases, it is the only way that we can tell who is doing what to whom. Sorry Rover.