> I bet there are quite a few where the order doesn't even matter at all.
One of my favorite Latin poems (not just mine, this one is famous for a reason) begins like so:
Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa
perfusus liquidis urget odoribus
grato, Pyrrha, sub antro?
Milton apparently translated this "almost word for word without Rhyme according to the Latin Measure, as near as the Language will permit" (http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/fifth_ode/text...). Here is the relevant part of that translation:
What slender Youth bedew'd with liquid odours
Courts thee on Roses in some pleasant Cave,
Pyrrha[?]
And here, I'll rearrange Milton's words into the word order of the original poem:
What [many] slender thee youth on roses
bedew'd liquid courts odors
pleasant, Pyrrha, in cave?
(Milton's "with" is reflected in the Latin, but it is the ablative case ending of "liquidis odoribus" rather than a word in its own right. The "some" is not indicated in the Latin. "multa" is an adjective, "many", applying to "rosa"; Milton has left it out, although he has changed the oddly singular "rosa" to plural "roses".)
Anyway, this poem is pretty much the apex of artistic expression of "free word order". Latin does have some restrictions on word order, and one of them is visible in the poem: the object of a preposition must immediately follow that preposition (this is the origin of the belief that sentences can't end with a preposition -- in Latin, they can't). But mostly you can place the words where you'd like.
Thank you for the example. The "large red ball" case brought up by OP is slightly different, though, because it's not about subject/object/verb ordering, but rather about relative ordering of adjectives.
Even in languages that do allow for relatively free reordering (my native, Russian, is also like that, and also uses it heavily in poetry), "red large ball" just feels awkward compared to "large red ball", so I think there is, indeed, some actual linguistic law behind it that applies to at least these languages.
The stretch is to claim, on the basis of a few (or even a couple dozen) languages, that the law is indeed universal. It's the exact same mistake that European linguists have made before, because they were basing their assumptions on a bunch of closely related languages that they were familiar with - and once they started studying more "exotic" stuff, like Native American and Polynesian languages, it turned out that many of those assumptions were only true for that original subset they were working with, and didn't apply in general.
One of my favorite Latin poems (not just mine, this one is famous for a reason) begins like so:
Milton apparently translated this "almost word for word without Rhyme according to the Latin Measure, as near as the Language will permit" (http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/fifth_ode/text...). Here is the relevant part of that translation: And here, I'll rearrange Milton's words into the word order of the original poem: (Milton's "with" is reflected in the Latin, but it is the ablative case ending of "liquidis odoribus" rather than a word in its own right. The "some" is not indicated in the Latin. "multa" is an adjective, "many", applying to "rosa"; Milton has left it out, although he has changed the oddly singular "rosa" to plural "roses".)Anyway, this poem is pretty much the apex of artistic expression of "free word order". Latin does have some restrictions on word order, and one of them is visible in the poem: the object of a preposition must immediately follow that preposition (this is the origin of the belief that sentences can't end with a preposition -- in Latin, they can't). But mostly you can place the words where you'd like.