Comment on Japan anon complains about Google
lars@lemmy.sdf.org 6 months agoSounds a little suss. All the propaganda I see about Latin mentions its free word order.
Comment on Japan anon complains about Google
lars@lemmy.sdf.org 6 months agoSounds a little suss. All the propaganda I see about Latin mentions its free word order.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 6 months ago
Word order in Latin is only syntactically free. As in, if you change the word order, you aren’t changing who did what. However, you’re still changing the topic (whatever we were talking about) and comment (the new info that I’m adding in).
I’ll give you an example:
Note how I used articles to convey roughly the same meaning in English. That’s because what Latin is doing with the word order is not too unlike what English does with articles. Sure, you can use “the boy”, “a boy”, or simply “boy”, it won’t change the basic meaning, but it’s still not “random”.