Final answer:
Latin is a language that relied on word endings, not fixed word order, to convey meaning due to its inflectional grammatical structure.
Step-by-step explanation:
The language that depended on word endings for meaning due to a lack of fixed word order is Latin. In Latin, the endings of words, known as inflections, indicate the word's role in a sentence, allowing for a more flexible word order without losing meaning. This inflectional nature is characteristic of what linguists call a 'synthetic' language, in which morphology, or word form, is crucial to the language's grammar and syntax.
Latin's grammatical structure emphasizes this aspect, which contrasts with 'analytic' languages like modern English, wherein word order plays a more significant role in determining meaning. English depends heavily on a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) structure to convey who is doing what to whom, whereas Latin can rearrange the words in a sentence freely due to its rich system of noun and verb endings. Thus, a direct translation of word order from Latin to English may seem jumbled, but it remains clear in Latin thanks to these important inflections.