I heard an interesting thing today: we were doing an exercise with Dative verbs and had the sentence:
Ich schenke meiner Schwester einen Hut.
So the word order is: Subject, Verb, Dative Obj, Acc. Obj. The exercise was using pronouns for the Acc Obj though. When a pronoun was involved, the sentence was:
Ich schenke ihn meiner Schwester.
So, by adding a pronoun, we changed the order to Subject, Verb, Acc, Dative. My teacher also noted that if there were two pronouns, it will be the same order, so:
Ich schenke ihn ihr.
I thought about it and I think it's actually the same in English: The same order applies for Accusative and Dative.
I'm giving my sister the hat.
I'm giving it to my sister.
I'm giving it to her.
Can someone explain this word order rule (why it is switching because of pronouns) and maybe some more examples of this?