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Although the original thread has been deleted (for a different reason) I think the question is interesting enough.

Let A be a noun and B a noun, an adjective or a prepositional phrase, and let a + indicate the fact that a form is marked (e.g. by lenition) for grammatical reasons. (so A [is]+B would indicate the pattern in _?benn danc_ 'a man is strong' and the [] indicate that the word is not written in Sindarin.

Naneth, if I understood you correctly, your argument for the word order advocated by yourself (and it's possibly David's argument, although I don't actually know) is the following:

Since we cannot know if "A [is] B" or "A [is] +B" is the correct pattern, it is safer to write "B [is] A" because here you don't have the question.

So - the obvious question for me is now - what would be the argument to say that "+B [is] A" is impossble (because if it is allowed, your argument breaks down immediately).

I can immediately give an argument why it could be possible - suppose there was a verb 'to be' in Old Sindarin that led to lenition of the phrase it connected with - and then it was left out and all that was left was the lenition (so "A [is] +B" would be the valid pattern).

Now, we know that verbs can lenit nouns - we have several examples in the corpus, e.g. _lasto beth lammen_ (LOTR). But in fact, it doesn't matter if we move the object before the verb, it is still lenited, cf. _Daur a Berhael, (...) eglerio!_ (LOTR) (see Mutations in Sindarin II.2 for the reasoning why it is indeed the same situation).

So it would not be unreasonable to assume that 'to be' behaves not very different from other verbs' and in this case, if "A [is] +B" is true, then word order doesn't matter either and "+B [is] A" would also be valid.