rbarr (Welcome! Delighted to have you and hope to hear more from you) has done a very good job of answering your questions, and got it in before I had to research and reply.

I might add a little bit to that info:

Latin, like ancient Greek, was written with the capital letters only, usually with little or no spacing between words, and no punctuation that we would ordinarily recognize. The lower-case letters and punctuation now used for both Latin and Greek were invented by scribes well after the Classical period to facilitate the copying out of texts.

The Latin word order, as rbarr noted, generally has the verb last in a phrase, clause or sentence. This is not, however, graven in stone; variations were frequent, especially for emphasis or euphony. Also, in poetry, word order may be very strange because of the requirements of scansion. But the word order didn't matter to the meaning of a sentence. Latin, like other ancient languages and many modern ones, was an inflected language, meaning that the relationships between words was determined by the inflections (endings) of the words, not their position vis-a-vis one another, as is the case in distributive languages like English. In English, in a sentence like, "The man hit the ball to the boy" who was doing the hitting, what was hit and to whom is determined by where the words are placed in the sentence. In Latin, the word order would not matter since the one doing the hitting would be in the nominative case, the thing hit would be in the accusative, and the one to whom it was hit in the dative case and the cases would be indicated by the endings of the nouns.

Lastly, hard as it is to imagine, Latin was a spoken language. There are those who think that the Classical style (and pronunciation) of Latin was already changing in the time of Augustus, or somewhere around 1 AD in Rome itself to what came to be known as Vulgar Latin (spoken by the common people) and that the classical Latin was used only by orators and maybe the upper classes. By 200 AD it was already more like medieval Latin than Classical Latin. But Latin was the lingua franca in western Europe (as Koine Greek had been in Classical times in most of the civilized world) up to the time of the Reformation. As late as 1850, lectures at Heidelberg were still given in Latin. In 1950 there was still a Latin oration given at commencement exercises at Oxford (Harry Truman was the guest in 1950, received an honorary degree, and the Latin orator included a joke about the predictions that Dewey would win the 1948 election). Latin still is the official language of the Roman Catholic Church and is still actually being spoken at the Vatican. It's supposed to be the official language of Church synods and councils, although it is doubtful if every RC bishop is sufficiently conversant with Latin to be able to participate in that language.