Apart from colloquial phrases, everything is strictly English word order: subject - verb - adjective - object. Active voice all the time. Mando'ade don't do passive; it's a vigorous, active language.
Interview with Karen Traviss by "Mr. Klingon" about the construction of Mando'a from October 2005: https://archive.org/details/JoelAndersonOntheHorizon
> Also, more generally, since (if I remember my grammar
> accurately) Mando'a in the above sentence functions
> as an adjective ("we are Mandalorians" like "we are
> hungry"), would the Mando'a come before the
> a'den in that sentence?
Mando'a is only used as the word for the language. The adjective is Mando. Apologies if I've not been correcting stuff as we've been going along but I'm told that it's easier to pick up a language if you concentrate on absorbing vocab first and grammar later than the other way around, so I've just been letting that slide.
It's subject followed by verb followed by adjective, just as in English, so subject followed by adjective implies "is" or "are". When you see the adjective folowed by a noun, you assume that there is no verb missing.
But you form the adjective from the noun by the suffix -la or 'yc, so Mando'ade a'den looks more like Mandalorian anger, not the Mandalorians are angry. (Not all adjectives end in -yc or -la, but most do. You can certainly form them safely this way.)
Mhi (cuyi) Mando'ade - we are Mandalorians.
Mhi Mando - We are Mandalorian
Mando'ade (cuyi) a'den'la - Mandalorians are angry.
mando a'den - Mandalorian wrath (although they might well elide that and drop the o if they were really, really mad...)
> where do direct objects fall in
> sentence structure?
Same as English - follows the verb. (Except in traditional songs and poetry, where anything goes and a certain amount of skill and familiarity with the piece is required to extract the meaning, rather like listening to Shakespeare.)
Karen Traviss, in post dated Oct 09, 2005 11:52 PM on https://web.archive.org/web/20061129174432/http://forums.starwars.com/thread.jspa?threadID=237751&start=75
This is why the word order is important. The subject must be right next to the verb. Which is why Mando poems and songs can be challenging, because they have to bend the rules.
Karen Traviss, in post dated Oct 12, 2005 01:24 AM on https://web.archive.org/web/20070208081059/http://forums.starwars.com/thread.jspa?threadID=237751&start=150