A confused student

[stickert]

Hello,
I've started recently an independence study from "Wheelock's Latin" (6th Edition, Revised), and I have a questions regarding to the 1st chapter:

I didn't understand really the "order" of a sentence. I mean, what comes first and what comes end. For example, does "me" should come before the verb or ofter? "non" should come before the verb or after the verb?
I had encountered a lot of confusing questions at the "sententiae" section.

I hope that someone can list up rules of the order of a sentence, in any situations, if some rules are really exists.

Thanks!

[modus.irrealis]

Hi,

First of all, good luck with learning Latin.

As for your question, the "normal" order of a sentence is Subject - Object - Verb, where "normal" here just means that if it were in another order something would be emphasized. So normally, since "me" has to be an object, it will come before the verb. "Non" normally comes before the word it modifies, so it will come before the verb as well.

The general form of the SOV rule is given in chapter 2, where the order is (1) subject (2) indirect object (3) direct object (4) adverbs (5) verb. But you need to remember that a word is not the subject because it comes first but because it's in the nominative case, and so on, so this order is not fixed, and Latin can have a very flexible word order.

Hopefully this helps you out.