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Can anyone offer a translation for the following? Est melior amavisse quan numquam amavisse omninoThanks 
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There is at least one misspelling and, I believe, a word missing in what you quoted. If it read
Melior est amavisse et deperdidisse quam nunquam amavisse omnino.
it would be:
It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
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So it was the "and lost" part that was missing from the original quote, plus quam and nunquam were each misspelled? Well, I suppose it could be argued that it's better to have loved and NOT lost, so perhaps the author was being optimistic  . Thanks very much for the help
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Another question comes to mind (I know NOTHING about Latin):
I noticed you transposed 'Est melior' to read 'Melior est' (a la 'Dolce et decorum est'). Is that because the way it stood would make it a question rather than a statement? the same way switching the "is" and the "that" in the preceding statement would have done the reverse?
And since I'm on a roll with sophomoric questions, am I correctly recalling that Latin did not make use of punctuation? Or even spaces, at least at one point? In that case, how *did* one signify a question?
Lastly, if Latin was not a spoken language, in what language did the people who wrote in Latin speak? And why on Earth did they write in Latin?
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Latin was not a spoken language???????
I thought all the nitty-gritty church rituals were in Latin. When I was quite young anyway. Am I remembering incorrectly.
If the truth be told I could be wrong. I was rather afraid of our priest as he yelled a lot, pointed at us young sinners and generally scared the beejeebies out of me with the inevitability of us going to hell real soon. I think he thought that if he scared us enough when we were in our pre-teens we would walk the rightious path as teens. Most of us just didn't go back when we hit our teens.
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Your questions, gymkhana, in reverse order:
1. Lastly, if Latin was not a spoken language, in what language did the people who wrote in Latin speak? And why on Earth did they write in Latin?
Classical Latin is generally considered to be the language spoken in Rome and environs between around 200 B.C. to 200 A.D. (roughly from Plautus & Ennius to Marcus Aurelius, with Cicero as the high point). There are some inscriptions in Archaic Latin from before this period, showing a slightly different form of the language.
Even before the fall of the Roman Empire to the Goths in 476 A.D., the spoken Latin, or Vulgar Latin (so-called not because it was obscene, but rather because it was the language of the people, the vulgus 'crowd'), had diverged quite a bit from the classical and written forms, especially in the widely separated provinces. The dialects of Latin that diverged from one another in Gaul, Iberia, Lusitania, Thrace, Italy, and other Roman provinces eventually developed into what are now called the Romance languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Italian, and other daughter-languages. So you could even say that Latin is not yet technically a dead language, because its dialects still have new native speakers.
Latin continued to be spoken as a second language and lingua franca throughout the former Roman Empire, and was also used for writing. It's interesting to examine the different varieties of Medieval Latin used by monks in different countries, since their spelling errors often reveal their native language.
2. am I correctly recalling that Latin did not make use of punctuation? Or even spaces, at least at one point?
Latin punctuation, at least in the Classical period, was different from the conventions that are familiar to us, which were developed in medieval times. Usually, inscriptions would separate the words with a dot about halfway up from the baseline, if the words were separated at all. Sometimes a colon : would mark the end of a sentence or clause.
3. In that case, how *did* one signify a question? and I noticed you transposed 'Est melior' to read 'Melior est' (a la 'Dolce et decorum est'). Is that because the way it stood would make it a question rather than a statement? the same way switching the "is" and the "that" in the preceding statement would have done the reverse?
Latin, unlike English, had rather free word order, so that for example: Agricola puellam amat basically means the same thing as Puellam agricola amat or Amat agricola puellam and so on -- 'the farmer loves the girl.' The Romans could get away with scrambling their sentences like this because of the inflectional endings: nominative case here in -a indicates the subject agricola 'farmer', while the accusative case in -am indicates the object puellam 'girl'.
Old English, and in fact all old Indo-European languages, had heavy inflections for case and number, enabling similar flexibility of word order, especially in poetry. But modern English no longer permits such free word order (except under 'poetic license'), and the order of words in The farmer loves the girl now means something different from the word order in The girl loves the farmer.
But just because Latin had rather free word order doesn't mean there was no basic word order. All else being equal, the normal word order for a main clause in Latin was SUBJECT OBJECT VERB . This is also the basic word order reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European, since it is the one found also in the earliest Sanskrit, Greek, and Hittite sentences, and also in relic environments like Germanic subordinate clauses. The order could be varied, however, for emphasis of certain words, or to distinguish new information from old information. Melior est would then be a more basic, or unmarked, word order than Est melior, though the latter would still not be a question.
In order to ask a question, there were special interrogative words, which would usually begin a direct question. For a wh-question, expecting a substantive answer, you could use interrogative pronouns or adverbs like : quis 'who?', quid 'what?', quando 'when?', and so on. For a yes/no question, the usual trick was to add the particle -ne after the first word:
Potesne hoc intelligere? 'Can you understand this?'
You could also use Nonne if the answer Yes is expected:
Nonne hoc intellegis? 'You understand this, don't you?'
And Num introduces questions that expect the answer No:
Num hoc intellegis? 'You don't understand this, do you?'
Hope this helps.
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Welcome aboard rbarr. Always glad to have another source of information we can call on. Bingley
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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.
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BobY, thank you. Your whole post was beautifully clear. I especially liked 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. That's the first time I've ever seen a good explanation of how (part of) Latin works. I have often been puzzled by the many ref.'s to these kinds of terms here. Oh--I liked your "graven", too, Sweetie. Love!
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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.
And the means by which it was hit in the ablative.
Marcus (nom.) hit the ball (acc.) with the bat (abl.) to the outfielder (dat.) Marcus pelotam fuste exagritatori feriebat.
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