Introduction I: Latin and English

• The principal difference between Latin and English is Latin is a heavily inflected language: it uses word-endings to do a lot of the business that in English is transacted by rigid word order.
  

• English is a language with comparatively rigid word order and comparatively few variable endings. In this example, you can tell who's biting whom by the order of the words, and if you change them around you get a quite different meaning:
  

• Because Latin uses inflections to do what English does by word order, word order in Latin is very flexible. Latin is an example of what's sometimes called a scrambling language, where you can work out the meaning of a sentence no matter what order the words come in.
  

• This flexibility of word order is one of the great resources of Latin expressiveness, especially in poetry, that simply isn't available in English. And what makes it possible is the much greater load of information carried by Latin endings. Take a look at this, for example.
  

• This is a sentence that most native English speakers would recognise instinctively as ungrammatical. Why? Well, for one thing the pronoun me seems to be in the wrong case: me is the accusative, the object case, whereas if I'm the subject of the verb we want the nominative, I. Secondly, the verb has the wrong inflexion: bites is third person singular, whereas if I'm the subject we want the first person, I bite.

• Turn this sentence into Latin, though, and something very interesting happens:
  

• Suddenly we have a grammatical sentence. Why? Because in Latin the endings matter more than the word order, and the endings tell us that the words relate to one another in a straightforward way.
  

• Once you see that, you can look again at the original English sentence and see that it was in fact a perfectly grammatical sentence all along; it just had the words scrambled:
  

• The point about a scrambling language is that this sentence would be perfectly grammatical in Latin whatever the order - and not only that, but it would be unambiguously translatable. You'd know exactly who was biting whom and so whether to ring the hospital or the vet.

• So the single most important thing to get your head around about coming to Latin from English is to unlearn the left-to-right thinking characteristic of English speakers, and to be guided by the endings rather than the word order.