The specifics of the order change are noticeable when examining the relationship between subject, verb and object. The switch from head last to head first means that case markers and inflexions have been shed as the subject-object-verb(SOV) relationship switched to subject verb object(SVO). For example, We three kings of Orient are is an example in which the more archaic form (SOV) is used. (I think that) Peter has sold his house is an example of an SVO construction. The resulting order, as inflexional markers disappear, is (SVO). An interesting fact about this increase in efficiency is that the decrease in processing energy entails the selection of a syntactic regularity, (SVO), over inflexional markers and an (SOV) relationship.
The information compactness, as defined in the previous chapter, for the new form is assumed to be more compact than for the ancestral form, that is, a description for a head-first language would be shorter than the older form. Moreover the reduction in energy involves a more stable, less flexible structural organization, not unlike many natural structures such as crystals in which a decrease in the energy available in a liquid, say water, will reconfigure the relationship between molecules to form a solid, ice. A crystalline configuration is information theoretically more compact, than a liquid because all of the crystal's structure can be inferred from a basic lattice that describes the organization of a few elements, repeated successively through out the crystal.