What Latin Teaches Us About Writing Strong Sentences
Evergreen lessons from a dead language
Everyone loves the Latin language. So romantic, so historic, so ceremonial. Up until the point that we actually start studying it. Then it’s so foreign, so incomprehensible, so unnecessarily complex.
The main reason that people think Latin will be easy to learn is because of its vocabulary. Latin words are often familiar to us, because so many of them are roots of English words. Consider the 3rd-declension noun mens, mentis, which means “mind.” It’s familiar from our adjective “mental.”
Latin grammar, though, is a whole different animal. We can see the problem developing even in the above example: What’s a declension again, and why does the genitive form, mentis, have a “t”? Why are Latin nouns listed as two words, anyway, when English dictionaries get along perfectly well with one? And so on.
The short answer (very short) is this: Latin grammar plays by very different rules. English is what’s called an “analytical” language, one in which word order largely creates a sentence’s meaning, assisted by a variety of helper words, like prepositions and articles. Latin is what’s called an “inflected” language, which means that a word’s endings, called inflections, shape the sentence’s meanings. For this reason, word order…
