Direct and indirect objects
I'm going to teach you how to make a basic sentence in Esperanto. The cool thing about Esperanto is that it's fluid with word order. You can say the cat ate the dog in any way possible you can even say the dog ate the cat and understand that the cat really ate the dog. We use this with direct and indirect objects.
Direct object definition: a noun phrase denoting a person or thing that is the recipient of the action of a transitive verb, for example the dog in Jimmy fed the dog. - Google
Basically what this means is that the direct object is something receiving an action. For example Jimmy in the example above isn't the direct object because it's not receiving an action.
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Indirect object definition: a noun phrase referring to someone or something that is affected by the action of a transitive verb (typically as a recipient), but is not the primary object (e.g. him in give him the book ).
If you break apart the example sentence that was in the definition you will see that him is the indirect object and book is the direct object. This is because book is receiving the action of being given.
Why is this important?
I said Esperanto is fluid in word order unlike English. In English direct objects and indirect objects are determined through word order this is not the case in Esperanto.
You can tell what is a direct object because it ends in an n suffix
Example: Jimmy nutris la hundon (Jimmy fed the dog)
Comments (1)
This is helpful