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I wanted to write the German equivalent of
"I have sent Wolfgang a letter, please let him open it (himself)"
So I wrote
"Ich habe Wolfgang einen Brief geschickt, bitte lass Ihn den öffnen"
Is this correct? It bothers me that both "Ihn" and "den" are in the accusative.
You can have two accusatives for two reasons: 1) You have two verbs 2) Both of those verbs take the accusative.
In the phrase, "lass ihn den öffnen," "ihn" is the accusative of "lass" and "den" is the accusative of "offnen." The other thing is that "lassen" and "offnen" both have accusative objects. Some other verbs, ("helfen" comes to mind) would take a dative object, so the phrase would be, "hilf ihm den öffnen."
Ich habe Wolfgang einen Brief geschickt, bitte lass ihn den öffnen.
These are two concatenated main clauses, let's only look at the second clause:
Bitte lass ihn den öffnen.
The predicate is lassen, which is a modal verb. It takes an accusative object, which is the person or thing which is allowed/encouraged to do something.
The verb öffnen, the action allowed by lassen, takes another optional accusative object which is the thing opened.
"lass ihn den öffnen" is not correct. It rather would be "lass ihn ihn öffnen" (is ugly, but more correct). First "ihn" for Wolfgang, the second for the letter.
