I guess what it want to ask is this: How am I supposed to know what the correct word order is when writing?
Now that I have become obsessed with Latin word order and have studied it somewhat directly through authors like Devine and Stephens, let me give the answer I wish I had heard when I began studying Latin. I probably have an idiosyncratic way of learning languages, so don’t worry if this approach doesn’t resonate with how you like to learn.
Word order alone, outside of the order of prepositions and their complements, is virtually never determined by syntax/grammar in Latin. This principle is fundamentally different from English and very hard for learners who are native English speakers to internalize. Instead, Latin word order is predominately determined by what modern linguists call pragmatics or discourse factors.
The rules explaining Latin word order are complex and only partially understood. To be fair, however, we only partially understand the word order rules for a language such as English, even though live native speakers are in abundance.
If you have questions about the word order of a particular sentence, I would be happy to try to analyze it, but the answer will probably be at least as complex as an answer to a grammatical question.
For most beginners, it is not worth obsessing over word order, given all the difficulties in Latin with other things, such as the numerous endings and unfamiliar syntax. It is worthwhile, however, to begin getting a small sense of what word orders seem typical. As an intermediate student, you can then start paying attention to atypical orders and what they might signify. As an advanced student, you can proceed to appreciate the full color of what variations in word order offer.
For a beginner, a simple pattern to begin noticing is that Latin tends to handle a sentence or a clause like a play. First you list the cast of characters (drāmatis personae) with a brief mention of their role, then you run the action. This approach means that entities are often listed first in a sentence, with the verb last. The subject, as the star of the “show,” typically comes first. Supporting characters come next in order of appearance or prominence with a grammatical ending that briefly summarizes their role in the play.
At a more intermediate level, you can see any meaningful combination of Latin words as an informational journey. Words that contextualize, shape, or identify the informational journey go earlier. Words that deliver, explain, or categorize information go later. Words that do little of either go last of all. These last two categories of words are one reason why the ends of Latin sentences sometimes host very important words and sometimes host obvious and unimportant words.
At a more advanced level, you can begin focusing on possible reasons for things like hyperbaton, chiasmus, ellipsis, the placement of pronouns, and the placement of the copula. Special factors can motivate these issues that are often not obvious to an English speaker. A more advanced learner can also take more note of when one information journey is imbedded within another. Rhetoric, sarcasm, bias, and humor will become more vivid. Argumentation becomes more precise.
Latin words are more informationally dense and independent than in English and so the word order rules are more akin to the word order rules for English phrases, clauses, and even sentences. Just as you can often move English sentences around in a paragraph without drastically affecting the basic meaning, you can move Latin words around in a sentence.
Just because you can jumble the sentences in an English paragraph or the words in a Latin sentence, does not mean you should. The result might not change the literal meaning, but random mixing will often produce something unclear, incoherent, and far from compelling. The reader might understand every word but be left wondering what you as the writer are trying to get at.
The traditional analysis of Latin ignored pragmatics until recently since it was not really understood as a field of study separate from semantics and rhetorical style. Students have been expected to acquire “natural” Latin word order by extensive reading (and/or listening) and imitation of good models. This is still good advice for most learners and is probably the approach taken by the authors of LLPSI.
Pragmatics is a field of linguistics that has developed only recently. It deals with how we shape an utterance as a puzzle piece to connect with the conversational context and world knowledge in particular ways. This process leverages the syntactical meaning of an utterance with context for a specific communication goal. It’s the difference between assessing the content of a simple picture by looking at it and hearing a narration of that content that can highlight different perspectives. A great deal of pragmatics is handled in English by intonation and different sentence structures, but Latin does a great deal more of this with word order alone.
Here are two English sentences that can illustrate the issue:
A. What kind of exercise did you get yesterday?
B. Yesterday, I played tennis in the park.
This sounds like a normal exchange. But compare it with this pair of sentences.
A. What kind of exercise did you get yesterday?
B. In the park, I played tennis yesterday.
This word order sounds out of place, even though it describes the exact same event with the exact same words. The reply does not fit in with the question correctly. The syntax/grammar is correct, but the pragmatics are wrong.
The pragmatics of word order is only an occasional issue in English, since so much is handled by intonation. In Latin, however, pragmatics effects word order at the level of the phrase, clause, sentence, and paragraph. Despite its pervasiveness in Latin, it will often make little difference in a casual written translation into English.
Unfamiliar and complex word orders are the bane of many a Latin student, to the point that many wonder whether Latin writers were deliberately trying to complicate things. Latin worder order varied across the centuries, from genre to genre, and author to author so that some types of Latin use what seems to be quite simple word order. Many students see this and wonder why all authors could not have adhered to simple rules, perhaps putting subjects here, adjectives there, and verbs tidily at the end. This common complaint misunderstands the real issue.
Old Latin writers exploited different word orders for different effects, just as Martin Luther King, Jr. exploited different intonations to animate his famous speeches. He would not have been as effective if he had spoken in a monotone. Similarly, Caesar and Plautus would not have been as compelling if they had restricted themselves to “simple” word orders. This linguistic reality is not limited to elevated language. An English-speaking parent trying to cajole a toddler does not use “simple” intonation, and Cicero gossiping with his friends by letter did not limit himself to “simple” word order.