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.

are also alike in that they lack articles. Russians learning English often don't know how to use articles.

In Classical Latin it was considered elegant style to put words far apart in a sentence when the inflections indicated their relationship.

on Tuesday.

Another bit of trivia about Newton, although I suspect you already know this: When his university closed down because of plague, and he was stuck at home, he invented calculus. Clearly not a slacker.

if I remember correctly. Newton understood that the study of motion required a new kind of mathematics.

Found it totally fascinating, and by the end of the semester I realized that everything I looked at could be interpreted as a calculus problem. Wow.

I have a phenomenally smart son who is in a PhD program in astronomy on the east coast, and as brilliant as I, his mother, thinks he is, I cannot begin to imagine him figuring out something like calculus.

I wonder what Isaac's mother thought.

"When Newton was three, his mother remarried and went to live with her new husband, the Reverend Barnabas Smith, leaving her son in the care of his maternal grandmother, Margery Ayscough (née Blythe)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton

Perhaps in his case it's what made Isaac the brilliant and original thinker that he was.