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Studying word order in Latin helps the reader to understand the author's meaning more clearly. For example, when a verb is placed at the beginning of a sentence, it sometimes indicates a sudden action: so complōsit Trimalchio manūs means not just "Trimalchio clapped his hands" but "Trimalchio suddenly clapped his hands".
Latin is a heavily inflected language with largely free word order. Nouns are inflected for number and case; pronouns and adjectives (including participles) are inflected for number, case, and gender; and verbs are inflected for person, number, tense, aspect, voice, and mood.
Latin orthography refers to the writing system used to spell Latin from its archaic stages down to the present. Latin was nearly always spelt in the Latin alphabet , but further details varied from period to period.
Latin word order is relatively free. The verb may be found at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a sentence; an adjective may precede or follow its noun (vir bonus or bonus vir both mean 'a good man'); [5] and a genitive may precede or follow its noun ('the enemies' camp' can be both hostium castra and castra hostium; the latter is more common). [6]
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There are seven Latin noun cases, which also apply to adjectives and pronouns and mark a noun's syntactic role in the sentence by means of inflections. Thus, word order in Latin is not as important as it is in English, which is less inflected. The general structure and word order of a Latin sentence can therefore vary. The cases are as follows:
The term Latin alphabet may refer to either the alphabet used to write Latin (as described in this article) or other alphabets based on the Latin script, which is the basic set of letters common to the various alphabets descended from the classical Latin alphabet, such as the English alphabet.
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