Word order: free, but not random

"Latin word order is free" is true and, on its own, unhelpful. The endings carry who does what, so the order is free of that job. What it is free for is emphasis, and Roman writers used it with precision. The default holds the verb back to the end.

The master sees the slave; it is the city the king sees; the king has a great city. The endings carry the roles in all three.

The default: verb last

English is subject, verb, object. Latin holds the verb back, so the word that tells you what is happening arrives last:

• Dominus filium videt. - The master sees the son.
• Homines bellum faciunt. - People make war.

The fix is a reading habit, not a rule: scan to the end of the clause for the verb before you translate anything. Once you know the sentence is about seeing or making, the nouns fall into place.

What moving a word does

The endings mark the roles, so moving a noun changes the stress, not the sense. The first and last positions are the strong ones; the middle is for ordinary information.

English needs extra words or a raised voice for this; Latin just moves the word. What it never does is change the ending: urbem is the object wherever it stands.

The verb-final rule is a tendency

Prose is looser than a textbook table, and two things float.

Forms of sum go almost anywhere and often sit early:

• Est deus in nobis. - There is a god within us. (Ovid, Fasti 6.5)
• In principio erat Verbum. - In the beginning was the Word. (John 1:1, the Vulgate)

Later Latin, including the Vulgate and the Church writers who produced much of the Latin that survives, drifts towards subject, verb, object, the order the Romance languages ended up with. So treat verb-last as what you scan for, not as something every sentence obeys.