How to Write in Plain English

Basically word order reflects the informational structure of the sentence, as opposed to grammatical structure. So what was known before, what is the new information, what is the surprising bit etc. East Asian languages like Japanese do this as well and are perhaps better known for this internationally.

I didn't say he stole the money. - Nem (not) én (I) mondtam (said-I), hogy (that) ellopta (he-stole) a (the) pénzt (money-accusative).

i DIDN'T say he stole the money. - Én nem mondtam, hogy ellopta a pénzt.

i didn't SAY he stole the money. - Mondani nem mondtam, hogy ellopta a pénzt. (Needs a bit of different structure)

i didn't say HE stole the money. - Nem mondtam, hogy ő lopta el a pénzt. (See how ő=he/she has only appeared now, it was implied by the conjugation before)

i didn't say he STOLE the money. - Nem azt mondtam, hogy ellopta a pénzt.

i didn't say he stole THE money. - Nem azt mondtam, hogy A pénzt lopta el. (This one is unusual already in English, we'd explicitly say "that money", not just "THE money").

i didn't say he stole the MONEY. - Nem azt mondtam, hogy a pénzt lopta el.

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Imagine if English had versions like:

Not I said he stole the money. I not said he stole the money. I not said stole he the money. I not said the money he stole.

Or something like that. Depending on which part is negated the order would be different. However since English morphology is very simple, you can't shuffle the words around because grammatical structure is only encoded by the words' position in the sentence, there are no significant conjugations and declensions to mark words according to their role in the sentence.

Depends on what "nuance" exactly means here. What I meant is specifically the kind of logical and structural ambiguity like what "NOT" refers to or what "TOO" refers to. For example "I ate lunch, too..." can be continued as "... not just my friend" or as "...not just breakfast". In Hungarian this wouldn't be possible because the grammar is less ambiguous. The word order would tell what the "too" refers to, similar with "not".

English feels distinctly "Tarzan-like", it feels like words put next to each other. Most of the difficulty in learning English comes from the strange orthography and the difficult phonology and, yes, some of the grammar too, like tenses. But students can start building correct sentences from day one, because there is not much complexity in the grammar. High fancy prose in English is mostly about using rare words and synonyms, not through intricate grammatical structure.

As I said one effect in the opposite direction is the richness of tenses in English. All the "I had been going" or "I used to go" and "I have gone" and "I am going" kind of complex tenses do not exist in Hungarian. So it may be that we just notice the parts of our native language that have no equivalent in the second language, while discounting things we don't "need" as extraneous complexity and fluff. For example in Hungarian if you want to tell a story with complex timelines, you can't rely on tenses alone as in English, you have to give more explicit times or say "before that" and "meanwhile" and similar temporal phrases explicitly.

Yes, that's what an analytic language is: words put next to each other.

English is also a creole language, synthesized from an Anglo base stratum with French imposed by the ruling class. This has a simplifying effect on a language: as you point out, English is simple to pick up, and devilish to master.

I will say this: Hungarians offer this complaint about English more often than can be explained by chance. Russians and Germans as well, two heavily inflected languages. I gather that Hungarians are justly proud of their language, and wish I had a spare decade to see what all the fuss is about!

One aspect of this analytic ambiguity which I treasure, is the facility with which humor can be expressed in English. Even the silly Groucho Marx kind, like "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know."

The tension is with standing out, culturally and otherwise. If what you do is outside the norm, you are “different” and “difficult to work with”.

But yea, doing the right thing is more important!