The word order doesn't make a difference? in trying to figure out mottos, etc. in genealogy and military histories even when I recognized the words, the order didn't always make sense to me.
It's sometimes a little difficult for speakers of languages with a relatively fixed word order to understand or believe that word order is not as important in inflectional languages such as Sanskrit or Latin. Basically word order (e.g., in English) is used to show the syntactic relationship between the verb and its subject and/or object(s). Latin has case endings that reflect what the exact relationship between a finite verb (mutat) and its subject (veritas) is. The noun veritas is in the nominative case (which is usually used for subjects). So, veritas mutat or mutat veritas can only mean "(the) truth changes". Change the case to the accusative, veritatem mutat (or mutat veritatem), and the whole sentence changes: "S/He changes (the) truth". It's gets to be even more fun when you throw in words like semper (an adverb) or adjectives which modify the noun. Take for example, the title of a famous poem by Lucretius, De rerum natura, literally "about" + "of-things" + "(the) nature", meaning when you put it together, "about the nature of things". The preposition (de) and the noun it goes with (natura) get split apart by another noun (natura). (This is why I always chuckle when people maintain that you cannot split infinitives in English because you cannot in Latin; first, infinitives in English a prepositional phrases, but not in Latin, and moreover, Latin loves to split prepositional phrases.)
