>>>Interesting. When I learned Latin, myself some 30-odd years ago, it was noun - adj., as in:
>>>
>>>"Pueri in herba longa sunt cum puellis pulchris".
>>
>>So there's nothing odd with either order, then. I still think it's "magnum opus" :).
>>
>>>Also, we were of the "waney weedy winchy" school of pronunciation. How about you?
>>
>>Our old professor (who retired next year)
>
>He retired next year????

Sorry, the following year. We use the word "following" in both senses. Language brain fart :).
But then we never use this word to mean "the immediate neighbor of".

>>gave us a brief tour of the classic pronunciation (caesar - kaisar, cicero - kikero, poena - poyna), and then we just learned the traditional, which is as it's pronounced by Italian clergy. So, vehny, vihdy, vintzy.
>
>Do you have the "w" sound in your own language though?

No. Slovenian has it in some dialects (including the official), that's how they pronounce the final -l in verbs ending with it in past tense.

But then, why would we need a "w" sound for Latin. Listen to Italian priests. Italian language also has no W.

*-- I wanted to add this to the above reply but you were faster:

One of the things that confuse me most in English, even after so many years of it, is the unbelievable ways Latin and Greek words are pronounced. May be that we were too close to the source - our kings and merchants had to deal with Romans (of the East Empire) until the Turks came, and these guys were also fluent with Greek, so we developed an ear for pronouncing them quite close to how they did. And the phonetic toolset is quite similar, except for the accent.

In English, however, it takes me sometimes quite a while to recognize the Latin I hear. Take "ee coal eye"... didn't recognize escherichia coli until the fifth time, and that was from context only. Or, "ewe station" - for Eustachian. And then the vanishing first consonant in words starting with ps-, gn- kn- pn-. Takes a stretch of imagination to recognize "noo matics" as "pneumatics".