I ran across the following sentence in the "Kurso de Esperanto 3" course:

Malsaĝulo ĉie sian nomon skribas.

I'm assuming that this word order is preferred. The word order doesn't particularly alarm me, but I'm just trying to figure out if there's a logic or standard practice that I can keep in mind. Would the correlative and the verb always or usually be placed as they are in this example?

Because of the accusative (-n), the word order is more flexible in Esperanto than in other languages (at least, more than in my mother tongue Spanish and more than in English, the only two other languages I speak appart from Esperanto).

Consider the following verses from "La Espero":

"Ne al glavo sangon soifanta
ĝi la homan tiras familion"

It is difficult to find a phrase with a more twisted word order, however it is easy to distinguish the subject, the verb and the object. Were it not for the rhyme and metric, a more convencional order would be:

"Ĝi ne tiras la homan familion
al la glavo soifanta sangon"

In English and in Spanish, such a twist in the word order would probably result in the phrase not being understandable, or at least in its being very confuse.

In general, the most frequent order in Esperanto is:

Subject > Verb > Object > Complements.

In this case:

Malsaĝulo skribas sian nomon ĉie.

A change in the order does not imply a change in the logical meaning of the sentence, but only in the emphasis (appart from matters of style, specially in poetry).

It seems that in this case, the change in the order aims to emphasizing what and where the unwise writes, rather than the fact that he writes something somewhere.

Regards,

Daniel

Lee:I ran across the following sentence in the "Kurso de Esperanto 3" course:

Malsaĝulo ĉie sian nomon skribas.

I'm assuming that this word order is preferred. The word order doesn't particularly alarm me, but I'm just trying to figure out if there's a logic or standard practice that I can keep in mind. Would the correlative and the verb always or usually be placed as they are in this example?

Thanks Daniel, that's very helpful. I can see how the word order in the example I posted emphasizes the ĉie, and it gives the sentence more of the feeling of a folk saying or aphorism.