Roman Capital Letters
Latin is what is called an inflected language, that is to say that the function and meaning of a word in a sentence depends mostly on its ending. This is unlike English where a word’s grammatical function is determined mostly by where it is located in a sentence. A good example of this is the sentence The dog bit the man. In English, the dog is the subject because it is first, bit is the verb, and the man is the direct object because it comes after both the dog and bit. To change the order even slightly is to change the total meaning of the sentence. The man bit the dog is a very different sentence. The same is not true in Latin. Canis momordit virum (The dog bit the man.) is the same as Virum canis momordit (The dog bit the man.) To say The man bit the dog, one would change the endings on the words man and dog. Vir momordit canem. This holds true for all of Latin, the ending of a words, not its location determine its function.
Also unlike English, Latin has grammatical gender. A word can be masculine, feminine, or neuter, and gender may or may not be related to actual gender. For example, the word calamitas (tragedy, cataclysm) is feminine, even though a tragedy is not actually a feminine entity. Adjectives, nouns, and pronouns all have gender, but verbs, adverbs, and prepositions do not.
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Very helpful. Thanks!
Nice.