Latin word order

Latin word order is relatively free. The subject, object, and verb can come in any order, and an adjective can go before or after its noun, as can a genitive such as hostium "of the enemies". A common feature of Latin is hyperbaton, in which a phrase is split up by other words: Sextus est Tarquinius "it is Sextus Tarquinius".

A complicating factor in Latin word order is that there are variations in the style of different authors and between different genres of writing. In Caesar's historical writing, the verb is much likelier to come at the end of the sentence than in Cicero's philosophy. The word order of poetry is even freer than in prose, and examples of interleaved word order (double hyperbaton) are common.

In terms of word order typology, Latin is classified by some scholars as basically an SOV (subject-object-verb) language, with preposition-noun, noun-genitive, and adjective-noun (but also noun-adjective) order. Other scholars, however, argue that the word order of Latin is so variable that it is impossible to establish one order as more basic than another.

Although the order of words in Latin is comparatively free, it is not arbitrary. Frequently, different orders indicate different nuances of meaning and emphasis. As Devine and Stephens, the authors of Latin Word Order, put it: "Word order is not a subject which anyone reading Latin can afford to ignore. . . . Reading a paragraph of Latin without attention to word order entails losing access to a whole dimension of meaning."^[1]