where does your club buy medals at?

[rcmatthews]

Tendencies. Plus as I am sure you know, poetry does not follow the standard rules of grammar. It's much more like putting a sentence into a blender and chopping it up. I will give here the opening passage of De Bello Gallico, with ending verbs highlighted.

GALLIA est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt Belgae,
aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli
appellantur. Hi omnes lingua, institutis, legibus inter se differunt. Gallos ab Aquitanis Garumna flumen, a Belgis Matrona et Sequana dividit.Horum omnium fortissimi sunt Belgae, propterea quod a cultu atque
humanitate provinciae longissime absunt minimeque ad eos mercatores saepe commeant atque ea quae ad effeminandos animos pertinent important,
proximique sunt Germanis, qui trans Rhenum incolunt, quibuscum continenter bellum gerunt. Qua de causa Helvetii quoque reliquos Gallos virtute praecedunt, quod fere cotidianis proeliis cum Germanis contendunt, cum aut suis finibus eos prohibent aut ipsi in eorum finibus bellum gerunt.

Every sentence ends with a verb, as well as most clauses. It looks like names of tribes take precedent over verbs for ending a clause, but I don't know why.

[keropie]

True, but the majority of Latin which is still read, anyhow, is poetry. The prose is relatively little (almost said few, but clearly an undefinable noun like prose isn't enumerable... what a mess that would have been! O.o) and far spread. Clearly in poetry (in any language I've encountered it in) takes great liberties with grammatical construction, but I rather expect that Latin as written on walls, bath houses, Roman discussion forums (imagine having to chisel all this stuff in!), and email was much less well formed than that which Caesar was writing. Additionally, I'd be surprised if Latin as spoken by the average Roman was as correct as that which was written (and even more surprised to be proven right or wrong, all things considered ).

[rcmatthews]

I would argue that quite a bit of the Latin which is read is not poetry, though poetry may have a majority.

Cicero
Propertius
Vulgate Bible
Satyricon
Bello Gallico
Bello Civili
Martial
Livy
Tacitus
Sallust
A commentary on the Aeneid, Servius I think

And I would agree that the Latin which survives is the highest level, not common speech. However, the grammar rules are based off of the surviving material. Latin poetry looks very convoluted to us, because we are not native speakers. However, take this sentence for instance.

"To the store go we, eggs and milk to buy, I, John and Carl." Though that is written in a fairly confusing manner, its meaning is able to be understood relatively easily. I imagine this is sort of what Latin poetry was like to a native speaker.

[keropie]

Essentially, I'm arguing that if you took a similar cross section of English writing (leaving out writing that includes dialogue in dialect), you'd find similar adhesion to English grammar as you do to Latin grammar.

And I still bet that if you take the incidence of a piece of Latin literature being read, most of it is poetry

Though I haven't read any in quite a while, poetry or prose... alas.

[rcmatthews]

In my program, we alternate semesters, one poetry, the next prose. Although as you say, Latin prose is quite poetic.

English however, has the great novelists, which Latin does not. Someone such as Hemingway or Fitzgerald is able to break these rules, as was previously said.

I think that English grammer rules are very open to argument. If most everyone agrees that while "Up I threw the ball" is gramatically correct, but sounds terribly out of place, doesn't it mean that "I threw the ball up" is correct?