"Femeia ne măsoară copiii."

Translation: The woman measures our children.

[jh963]

How does this sentence work?

[Batsteve]

Seconding the request for a native to help break down this sentence.

If I squint, I could imagine this looking like a dative object construction. Is there some kind of metonymy here, where "our children" becomes "us" when turned into a pronoun?

[jh963]

Sorry, I've figured it out since then. "Ne" is in the dative case here. I've no idea what it's doing in the section about accusative pronouns.

[MarkDeVernon]

Why is "... our children" not translated as "... copiii noștri"?

[jonnie_z]

That would work as well, but another way to do that in Romanian is to have a dative pronoun (here: ne) instead of the possessive pronoun. Literally, the sentence is "The woman measures to us the children." Not sure if there is a reason to use the one over the other (emphasis?), but they both are possible.

[MarkDeVernon]

I see. Thank you. It is a pity, then, that the English does not read "The woman measured the children for us", in which form the dative case would have been more apparent. Furthermore, I do not believe that we have been taught yet the use of dative pronouns in Romanian.

[jonnie_z]

Even in the discussion for this section, the example uses dative pronouns and dative constructions, not accusative.