Talk:Latin word order

Useless without Glosses!
Yes, it has already been said, but really, what is the point of discussing the word order of a language and providing examples if the examples are not glossed? The meaning of Latin words is not simply self-evident just because English has a large number of Latinate words in its vocabulary. 120.22.167.168 (talk) 06:15, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

Word-for-word Glossing?
I think that this page was probably mostly made with the assumption that it's target audience would be learners of Latin. For such readers, English translations are probably enough to figure out the meanings of any words they don't know. That being said, it is rather awkward for other people to follow an article about word order when the article doesn't clearly tell them which word is which in the examples. (I'm able to follow it by cognates with English and Spanish, general exposure to Latin, and occasionally looking up words on Wiktionary, which is pretty good with Latin.)

The standard way to deal with this in linguistics is with trilinear glosses. The first line is the original, the second line puts a translation under each word (usually morpheme-by-morpheme or at least explicitly marking declension and conjugation, but it would be possible to do it without that), and the third line translates the meaning of the phrase in plain language (plain English in this case). Here's an example from the Wikipedia page on quirky subject (The language is Icelandic.):


 * {| class="wikitable"


 * Mig || vantar || peninga
 * I.ACC || need || money.ACC
 * colspan="3" |I need money.
 * }
 * colspan="3" |I need money.
 * }

I probably could do this by looking up each word separately, but I'm sure it would be a lot better if someone who actually knew Latin did it. This also would help the minor problem of translations that I've figured out are, if not inaccurate, at least significantly non-literal. I've encountered 3 like this, but I only changed one, largely because I was afraid there might be something about Latin I just didn't realize: There used to be this example in the article:

statim complūres cum tēlīs in hunc faciunt dē locō superiōre impetum.[77] "Immediately several men with weapons make a (sudden) attack on my client from higher ground."

The original latin clearly doesn't mention a client, but it does have the word "hunc", which is the accusative masculine singular of the proximal demonstrative pronoun, essentially "him" (nearby;× direct object or sometimes prepositional object) in this case. I assume this must be a quotation from a court case or something, where "hunc" refers to the speakers client, and the translator just decided to make the meaning more explicit. The citation (Cicero, prō Milōne 29) seems to just cite the latin, not the translation, so I changed the article to say:

statim complūres cum tēlīs in hunc faciunt dē locō superiōre impetum.[77] "Immediately several people with weapons make a (sudden) attack on him (my client) from higher ground."

just so that someone trying to figure out what the words in the Latin meant would realize they were supposed to be looking for "him" and not "my client". (Also note that "complūres" is apparently the same in masculine and feminine.) What I could have done instead, would be to turn the whole thing into an interlinear gloss, perhaps like so:




 * statim || complūres || cum || tēlīs || in || hunc || faciunt || dē || locō || superiōre || impetum.[77]
 * immediately || many.NOM.PL || with || weapon.ACC.PL || in || this.M.ACC || make.3.PL || from || place.ABL || higher.ABL || attack.ACC
 * colspan="11" | Immediately several men with weapons make a (sudden) attack on my client from higher ground.
 * }
 * colspan="11" | Immediately several men with weapons make a (sudden) attack on my client from higher ground.
 * }

(I tried to avoid putting too much unnecessary grammatical information on the ends of the glosses (like marking singulars or active verbs, or putting genders when it's not important), but I don't know exactly what the policy on that should be about that.)

75.88.217.51 (talk) 20:03, 23 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Personally, I think adding a word-for-word gloss for every example would make the article extremely cumbersome. Showing grammatical information as well, as in your example (immediately	many.NOM.PL	with	weapon.ACC.PL	in	this.M.ACC	make.3.PL	from	place.ABL	higher.ABL	attack.ACC) distracts very much from the points being made: when word order is being discussed, it doesn't really matter whether a word is nominative or ablative: whether we say populus Romanus or populo Romano, the point about the word order is the same. Moreover, no glossing is used or felt to be necessary in any of the standard textbooks on the subject, such as Divine and Stephens, or Spevak. I would have thought that this topic, which is one of the more abstruse and subtle areas of Latin, would mainly be of interest to people who already know a bit of Latin and require no glossing other than a translation. Possibly your change of "my client" to "him (my client)" is acceptable, although hunc doesn't really mean "him" or even "this"; in court cases it is the standard word for "my client". Kanjuzi (talk) 05:16, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

As I pointed out, it's possible to do word-for-word glossing without any grammatical information, kind of like the page on scrambling (linguistics) does.Then the example might look like:

or simply:
 * statim || complūres || cum || tēlīs || in || hunc || faciunt || dē || locō || superiōre || impetum.[77]
 * immediately || many || with || weapon || in || my client || make || from || place || higher || attack
 * colspan="11" | Immediately several men with weapons make a (sudden) attack on my client from higher ground.
 * }
 * colspan="11" | Immediately several men with weapons make a (sudden) attack on my client from higher ground.
 * }

"statim complūres cum tēlīs in hunc faciunt dē locō superiōre impetum."[77]

Immediately several men with weapons make a (sudden) attack on my client from higher ground.

lit.: immediately many with weapon in my-client make from place higher attack 67.141.66.230 (talk) 20:56, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

That being said, it is true that the underlines are usually sufficient to understand the points being made. The main reason I had to even look anything up was because I was trying to figure the entire word order of sentences rather than just the highlighted element. Any attempt to add glossing would make the article a lot longer unless the plain translations were removed (which I do not advocate). Either way, I can see how that might make it harder to read, given how many examples the article has. 67.141.76.136 (talk) 21:53, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

Theoretical approaches
In the Theoretical approaches section, the following word order is given as the norm for Latin:


 * Subject – Direct Object – Indirect Object / Oblique Argument – Adjunct – Goal or Source – Non-Referential Direct Object – Verb

I think it would be highly beneficial for an example sentence (or sentences) be given which follow this with the parts of speech labelled. My ability in Latin is, however, insufficient. - 51.149.249.35 (talk) 08:22, 28 April 2023 (UTC)


 * It's actually quite difficult to find a sentence that follows the above word order in a completely neutral context, and certainly impossible to find one with all seven items! And the point of the section is that many scholars don't agree with that approach. However, it might be possible to add a couple of examples. Kanjuzi (talk) 10:21, 28 April 2023 (UTC)
 * I get that it would be (probably) impossible to find a sentence will all of the elements there, but a few examples could show how they come together. Like "the soldier gave his sword to the boy in the field" would satisfy everything except goal/source and non-ref object. - 51.149.249.35 (talk) 11:16, 28 April 2023 (UTC)
 * I've added some simple examples, but can't find one in Devine and Stephens or elsewhere combining an indirect object and an adjunct or goal/source. Anyway, I hope these so far are helpful. Kanjuzi (talk) 05:57, 29 April 2023 (UTC)