Pontifex maximus pointed out that the term existed before there were any bridges in Rome and derived the word from Old Latin "pontis" (sic) meaning a powerful or absolute master, while others derived it from "potis facere" in the sense of "able to sacrifice". The last derivation is mentioned also by Varro, who rejected it, but it was the view of Pontifex Maximus Quintus Scaevola. Others have held that the word was originally "pompifex" (leader of public processions). The word "pons" originally meant "way" and "pontifex" would thus mean "maker of roads and bridges". Another opinion is that the word is a
Word order in main clauses, SVO word order being the most common. Using the guidelines above, the unmarked word order is then SVO. Many synthetic languages such as Latin, Greek, Persian, Romanian, Assyrian, Russian, Turkish, Korean, Japanese, Finnish, and Basque have no strict word order; rather, the sentence structure is highly flexible and reflects the pragmatics of the utterance. Topic-prominent languages organize sentences to emphasize their topic–comment structure. Nonetheless, there is often a preferred order; in Latin and Turkish, SOV is the most frequent outside of poetry, and in Finnish SVO is both the most frequent and obligatory when case marking fails