parsing the title of Newton's opus magnum

[Igel]

1. Yup.

Except that in some heavily inflected Indo-European languages it's perfectly okay to put the genitive before the noun, and sometimes preferred. Same for adjectives--they usually follow. These things pattern a bit, with adjective-noun order and object-verb order typically correlated. (I think Latin's got it backwards, like English, but it's a correlation and not a requirement; mismatched systems typically result from language change. But in the case of Latin it's all written and more than a little archaic for the most part--even "speech" is stylized and written. Vulgar Latin in graffiti tends to be a bit different.)

Latin is traditionally labeled something like subject-object-verb, but it's best seen as being something like Russian: Word order depends on information flow so while there are common word orders a lot of things can be split up or flipped. (It does in most languages, but with inflexions it's easier to take that several levels higher.)

John quickly read Newton's opus magnum in English.

John quickly read Newton's o.m. in English.

Quickly and in English, John read ...

It was Newton's o.m. that John read--quickly and in English.

The o.m. that John quickly read in English was Newton's.

And so it goes.