That is thanks to Latin having declension, which many other languages have too. I don't speak it, but I've read that Finnish has 15 cases (compared to 5 in Latin). Nice thing with Latin is that it manages to be both powerful and very clean, with fairly simple rules that always apply, phonetic alphabet, etc. Latin is probably the language with the best balance between power and simplicity. For instance my native tongue Serbian/Croatian has phonetic alphabet and distinguishes cases, number and gender, so it gives you a lot of power to play with words, to make very long sentences that are still easy to understand and to be able to understand the meaning even when some letters or words are missing...but it's much more complicated to learn than Latin because of a lot of additional rules in play.
Classical Latin didn't have a phonetical alphabet, though. Long and short vowels were not distinguished, letter "u" didn't exist, and Greek borrowings were written non-phonetically (e.g. the "ph").
