The
technical terms you're looking for are "Syntax" and "Diction."
There are languages in the world for which the grammar is Syntax based, which means that the word order determines the meaning of the sentence.
The other languages (there might be more kinds, but I haven't heard of any) are Diction based, which means that the word choice matters much more while word order doesn't matter as much.
English is a Syntax-heavy language, which means that "gun-shot" =/= "shot-gun". The order of the words changes the meaning. In a Diction heavy language, the terms are either equal or can be equal depending on context, though "gun-shot" isn't a great example of this.
Perhaps a better example would be:
The lion licked the trainer.
The trainer licked the lion.
In English, a syntax heavy language, these two sentences have VERY different meanings, as the subject and object are inverted by their change in position in the sentence. If English were a Diction heavy language, there would be some sort of affix indicator attached to the words to indicate which word is the subject and which the object, making word order unnecessary for disambiguation.
In Diction Heavy English, it might look like this:
The lionus licked the trainerad.
The trainerad licked the lionus.
Both of these sentences would be identical in my made up, Diction Heavy English. According to the rules of this made up language, the Subject is indicated by adding "-us" to the noun and the object by "-ad." To get the inverse sentence you could use either of the following sentences:
The trainerus licked the lionad.
The lionad licked the trainerus.
And in a diction heavy language, both of those would be equivalent to each other and inverted compared to the previous two. Of course, in most Diction heavy languages, it's not quite as simple as adding an affix, but you must be careful to pick the RIGHT affix. Thus, in a Diction heavy language, it's critical to make sure you pick the right word. I.e. "lionus" is very much not the same word as "lionad" just in the same way that "he" and "him" are very different words. In fact, the difference between him/he, he/she, they/them, is a carryover from Old English, which was actually a Diction heavy language.
Funny how Old English, a Diction heavy language, and Latin, another Diction heavy language, merged to form Modern English, which is a Syntax heavy language. Not sure, but it probably had something to do with French influence on the Latin.
Mando'a seems to me to be mostly Syntax heavy simply because it's based grammatically on basic, which is English, thus inheriting the Syntax dependency from English. However, one trick you can use to get around any normally tricky English rule is the "Occam's Razor" of Mando'a: The simplest way to say something is often the best. Mando'a relies almost entirely on context for everything, so it's more Diction Heavy than normal English is due to the use of much fewer words. It relies so heavily on context to disambiguate a sentence that it would be hard to mess up the word order so badly that you couldn't understand it, while Mando'a's limited lexicon forces you to be very picky about word choice. However, I would argue that the diction heaviness is an illusion. We work hard to pick the right words because we have so few, but syntax prevails in being the dominant establisher of meaning.
Example:
Ni juri gar.
Gar juri Ni.
Ni gar juri.
While the last one and the first one might be permissible in common Mando'a, you might get some funny looks. In fact, people might wonder if you were taught to speak by Yoda. However, if you tried to use the first and second sentences interchangeably, you would run into trouble. Even if the context was perfectly well known, equating those two sentences would be awkward to use at best.
I would say that, in the end, Mando'a relies too heavily on English's grammar structure to ignore word order. Now, don't let that convince you that word order must always follow certain rules. Remember that context and implied meaning rule hand in hand with the truncation and abbreviation of everything which is unnecessary, creating a very context-based speech environment. Word order is only a guideline and a means of disambiguation. In layman's terms, you only really need to strictly follow word order when not doing so would be terribly confusing to other people. Anything that gets your point across is generally acceptable provided it doesn't take much work for everyone else to get the point of what you're trying to say.
In fact, we could pretty much make a Mando'a linguistic law around that idea, since it's present, but not well described, in the language anyway:
The "best" grammatical structure for any Mando'a sentence is the sentence which creates the least amount of work for both the speaker and the listener in communicating with each other.
If it's easier to say and/or easier to understand, then it's grammatically preferable.