Melligo e floribus melliferis venit.

Melligo is nominative singular, so it is the subject of the sentence.

A good clue is the verb venit, which is third person singular: it comes or it came/has come, depending on context. Since melligo is a singular noun in the nominative, it matches the verb naturally as the thing doing the action.

Also, venire here is intransitive, so it does not take a direct object. That makes it even more likely that melligo is the subject, not an object.

Those endings are common, but they are not the only possibilities.

Melligo is a third-declension noun, not a first- or second-declension noun. Third-declension nominative singular forms are much less predictable and can end in many different ways.

So melligo is like other third-declension nouns such as:

• origo
• imago
• ratio

Its dictionary form is something like melligo, melliginis, which shows that it belongs to the third declension.

Because the preposition e takes the ablative case.

So:

• e/ex = out of, from
• noun after it = ablative

Here the noun is floribus, meaning from flowers.

It is plural because the idea is from flowers, not from one flower.

Also, the base noun is flos, floris, a third-declension noun, and its ablative plural is floribus.

Because melliferis is an adjective modifying floribus, and Latin adjectives must agree with the nouns they describe in:

• case
• number
• gender

So if floribus is:

• masculine
• plural
• ablative

then melliferis must also be:

• masculine
• plural
• ablative

That is why the phrase is e floribus melliferis.

It literally means honey-bearing or honey-producing.

It comes from:

• mel / mell- = honey
• fero = I carry, bear

So mellifer means something like bearing honey.

In this sentence, floribus melliferis means honey-bearing flowers or nectar-bearing flowers, depending on how the sentence’s meaning has been presented in your material.

E and ex are the same preposition. Both mean out of or from.

In general:

• e is commonly used before a consonant
• ex is commonly used before a vowel or h

Since floribus begins with f, using e is perfectly normal:

• e floribus

You may still sometimes see ex before consonants in Latin, but e floribus is the more expected form.

Because Latin word order is much freer than English word order.

English usually needs a fairly fixed order:

• subject + verb + other elements

Latin does not depend so heavily on position, because the endings already show the grammatical roles.

Putting the verb at the end is very common in Latin prose. So:

• Melligo e floribus melliferis venit

is a very natural Latin arrangement.

A different order could also be possible, for example:

• E floribus melliferis melligo venit
• Venit melligo e floribus melliferis

The basic meaning would stay the same, though the emphasis might shift.

Formally, without macrons, venit can be ambiguous in writing.

It may be:

• venit = comes / is coming (present)
• vēnit = came / has come (perfect)

If macrons are written, the difference is clear:

• venit = present
• vēnit = perfect

If macrons are not written, you usually tell from context or from the translation already given.

Because Classical Latin has no articles.

Latin does not have direct equivalents of English the or a/an as ordinary articles. So a noun like melligo or floribus can mean:

• the ...
• a/an ...
• sometimes just the noun in a general sense

You decide which English article to use from the context and the meaning already supplied.

Yes. Very literally, e/ex means out of or from.

In smoother English, though, from honey-bearing flowers is usually the best translation here.

So the Latin phrase has the idea of source or origin: the melligo comes from those flowers.

Because of agreement.

Melliferis is ablative plural, and floribus is also ablative plural, so they clearly go together.

But melligo is nominative singular, so melliferis cannot describe it.

This is one of the big advantages of Latin inflection: even if the word order changes, matching endings often show which words belong together.