Warning: speculation follows, hopefully not all baseless
1. magna cum laude great with praise
with great praise
Now, you might notice that the adjective is before the preposition, and that's odd by English standards. In ordinary Latin you might get
2. cum laude magna
Yes, the adjective is prone to coming after its antecedent noun, hence the name antecedent. In previous entries, I've mused as to what is going on here. And I don't know that I've got any stunning new insight about why the preposition should move to where it does. In fact, it probably doesn't move to the spec P position. Oh well. Here's an example
3. Cytoriaco radium de monte tenebat (Met, 6.132)
cytorian shuttle down.from mountain she.held
She held a shuttle from the Cytorian mountain (i.e. boxwood).
The adjective Cytoriaco is separated quite a way from its antecedent noun monte, which is behind the preposition—as it should be. And this made me wonder whether there was some rule in how to separate an adjective from its noun. Latin is famous for this sort of word order play in poetry: noun and adjective bracket a line. It's picked up a name: Latin sandwich. Here it is in the Metamorphoses.
4. et rupit pictas caelestia crimina vestes (Met, 6.131)
and she.broke decorated celestial crimes cloths
And she [Minerva] tore apart the tapestry decorated with the crimes of the gods
Just what I want to show you. In 4, the adjective, pictas, comes well ahead its antecedent, vestes. Once again, I've done some casual looking around. The pattern seems to hold. If a noun and its adjunct adjective are separated, the adjective comes first.
But so what? It is even real? I don't know I'll have to file this under: things to look into.
