L'ordre des pronoms I : me/te/nous/vous, puis le/la/les, puis lui/leur

Unité GR-18 · campagne 6 · deux pronoms devant le verbe : qui passe d'abord ?

Russian word order is free enough that я тебе её дам and я её тебе дам both work. French clitics allow exactly one order, and it is not negotiable. When two object pronouns stack before the verb, they file into fixed columns:

Read it left to right; a sentence uses at most one pronoun per column, in column order. Two patterns cover everything in this unit:

Pattern A — person is me/te/nous/vous: person first.

• Tu me prêtes ta voiture ? — Je te la prête.
• Ton livre ? Je te le rends lundi.
• Les photos ? Nous vous les montrons ce soir.

Pattern B — person is lui/leur: thing first.

• Il donne les clés à sa sœur. → Il les lui donne.
• Elle raconte cette histoire à ses enfants. → Elle la leur raconte.
• Ce livre, je le lui donne demain.

Notice the flip: je te le rends but je le lui rends. The first- and second-person pronouns (and se) always win the front position; third-person recipients lui/leur always yield it. There is no logical reason to derive — it is pure convention, the same kind of frozen sequencing as English "give it to him" vs "give him it".

A pronunciation note that helps memorisation: these pairs fuse into single rhythmic words — [ʒətəla], [ʒələlɥi] — which is why drilling them out loud works better than reasoning each time. The practice gives you a full mix of Pattern A and Pattern B until the column order comes out fused.

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