LSP - 1 : Latin is an Inflected Language

Have you ever sat in an ancient Greek theatre while a tour guide whispering from the stage shows off the impressive acoustics? If not, perhaps you’ve read about how well acoustically engineered these structures were. A friend once explained to me that they HAD to be, because Greek is an inflected language. 

Here is how the Cambridge Dictionary defines inflected languages :

a language that changes the form or ending of some words when the way in which they are used in sentences changes: Latin, Polish, and Finnish are all highly inflected languages.

According to my friend, if the acoustics weren’t good, the ancient audience would miss the word endings, and therefore not understand what role individual words were playing in a sentence. It would be chaos. This makes sense for Latin just as much as it does for Greek.

Here, for example, are all the ways that you can write (or say) the name of the god Neptune, depending of what role the sea god is playing in the sentence: Neptūnus, Neptūne, Neptūnum, Neptūnī and Neptūnō. Imagine trying to understand Latin without hearing or paying attention to word endings! It would be a disaster.