Some years ago, a friend and I were talking about the differences between the Romanian and English languages: his native language was Romanian, mine was English. No doubt we have a particular fondness for our native ‘tongue’, so a small grammatical quibble quickly turned into a warm debate. In English, you usually place adjectives before nouns, such as ‘blue cathedral’, ‘fresh air’, ‘modern car’, while in Romanian the adjective usually comes afterwards (‘chocolate tasty’, ‘keyboard loud’, ‘wifi slow’, etc). I suspect English is an odd one out in this regard as most European languages seem to do it ‘the Romanian way’.
Anyway, we both started trying to convince the other that our native language did it the ‘right’ way. I claimed that, if an adjective is being used at all, then it must be rather significant and so should come as early in the utterance is possible. He countered by arguing that from from the perspective of information delivery, it’s better to have the noun first, so you know what is getting qualified with an adjective prior to hearing those adjectives — information first, supplementary context afterwards. I thought about what it must be like to think in Romanian, with your adjectives always arriving late, and how that might make you think of the world as a collection of things shaded with detail, instead of a collection of shaded with detail things.