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‘Palatina Medea’ or ‘Medea Palatina’? A preference for adjective-noun word order in Latin
We’ve been told that adjectives in Latin ‘tend to’ or ‘prefer to’ follow the nouns they describe. But on the contrary, the statistical evidence shows that Caesar and Cicero actually preferred putting adjectives before nouns. We didn’t learn that ‘noun then adjective’ rule from reading unadapted Latin. We didn’t discover it from real usage. We…