CatholicBerean:
I only have 2 years of Latin from high school back before the bicentennial, but I remember enough to share that it’s good to know that in Latin the sequence of words is of absolutely no importance.
This is why for folks who haven’t been made familiar with the construct of Latin words, themselves may trip over learning Latin and think that Latin is so DIFFICULT to learn.
You don’t just learn singular and plural for each noun. You learn 5 declensions (if I remember right, Aurelia?) for each singular and plural of the same noun for whatever grammatical purpose of 5 standard grammatical purposes that noun happens to have in that sentence.
Not only do nouns have the characteristic of being either male or female (like in Spanish) but they might instead be neutral.
Nouns have their own declensions that indicate whether that word is the subject or the object of the sentence. Or is taking another role in grammar like the object of a preposition. If it’s the object of the preposition, the word iends differently than if it’s the subject of that particular sentence or if it’s the object of that particular sentence.
It doesn’t matter at all WHERE in the sentence the subject appears. The subject can occur last or in the middle of the sentence and still be the subject.
So… it’s the same thing for whether it’s:
Quaesitor veritatis
or veritatis quaesitor
Defensor veritatis
or veritatis defensor.
Defensor means “defender of” as the subject of the phrase.
Veritatis means “truth” as the object of the phrase because “is” ends the word that means “truth,” itself. “Truth” as the subject would start with the same stem “veri” and end with a different ending to make it the subject.
Have I lost you yet? Sorry… but I don’t remember offhand what the stem in Latin for “tuth” is…
Does this help?
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