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If I wanted to say "The teacher who made the kids write a letter to their
friend in the hospital", how should I write it?

Are 2 にs ok in the same sentence?  
Would 病院にいる友達に子供に手紙を書かせた先生。be acceptable?

If there are no particles, how should I interpret a causative like 書かせた人

Would it be

  1. The person who made someone else write
  2. The person who was made to write by someone
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2016-06-15T12:52:23.740
35941
2016-06-15T20:17:34.980
2016-06-15T20:17:34.980
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question
grammar causation
Questions about causative constructions
This sentence would be at least understandable if you change the word order
and write like this:

> 子供に病院にいる友達に手紙を書かせた先生

It's because this sentence will be parsed like this (with "nesting"):

> [子供に[病院にいる友達に手紙を書か]せた]先生

The "病院にいる友達に手紙を書く" part should be written as one verbal phrase because that's
the action the child has to take.

This question is more or less similar: [Multiple "wo"s in a
sentence?](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/23261/5010)

* * *

That said, it would be much better if you can avoid multiple に's like this.
Multiple に both marking a person is hard for even native speakers to
understand. The simplest way to fix this is using へ instead.

>   * 子供に病院にいる友達 **へ** 手紙を書かせた先生
>   * 子供に病院にいる友達 **への** 手紙を書かせた先生
>   * 病院にいる友達 **への** 手紙を子供に書かせた先生  
>  (This is okay, as @優しいエイリアン suggested, because への modifies 手紙, and
> 病院にいる友達への手紙 is one noun phrase)
>   * [*] 病院にいる友達へ手紙を子供に書かせた先生 ( **wrong** )  
>  (Can you see why this is wrong? へ modifies the verb 書く. The "nest"
> structure will be broken if you write like this)
>

* * *

And I see nothing wrong with sentences like this:

>   * 子供に夜にお菓子を食べさせるのは良くない。
>   * 夜に子供にお菓子を食べさせるのは良くない。
>   * 夜にお菓子を子供に食べさせるのは良くない。  
>  (uncommon word order, but perfectly makes sense)
>
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2016-06-15T14:30:17.483
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2016-06-15T14:48:21.877
2017-04-13T12:43:44.863
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answer