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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…
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Moving words: which languages have the closest word order to Ancient Greek?
There’s an art to translation. It involves moving concepts from one language into another while trying to refit the same thought into a different set of grammar rules. In this study I’d like to look at one obvious part of the translation process: word order change. In studying this, I don’t mean to suggest that…