Icelandic nouns are assigned to one of three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, or neuter), and are declined into four cases (nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive).
In nouns, definiteness and non-definiteness depend on articles, but are not related to strong and weak declension types.
In nouns, weak and strong declension types describe endings expressing gender, case, and number, rather than definiteness and non-definiteness.
[1][2] Icelandic nouns are declined in four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive.
In this case, the pronoun moves to the end of the sentence: In English, changing the word order like this would either render a phrase nonsensical or make it sound poetic.
This is mainly due to the fact that whilst being a Germanic language, English has lost most of its noun declension.
They are a leftover from the Old Icelandic (and Old Norse) use of a dual number along with the singular and plural when it came to the 1st and 2nd person pronouns.
The Icelandic demonstrative pronouns are as follows, where the three columns for each person represent masculine, feminine and neuter genders respectively: Þessi and sá roughly correspond to this and that, and hinn means the other one of two.
Adjectives must agree with the gender, number and grammatical case of the nouns they describe.
As with most inflected languages, the verbs in Icelandic determine (or govern) the case of the subsequent nouns, pronouns and adjectives of a sentence.
Other exceptions include the auxiliaries munu and skulu; þvo (wash), which was originally þvá; and a verb borrowed from Danish, ske (happen).
Take the infinitive tala ('to talk'), for example: Note how, for each of the verb groups, the conjugations in the singular change but, in the plural, the endings are nearly always predictable (-um, -ið and -a, respectively).
The simplification of inflections through person and number seen in Danish (and standard Norwegian & Swedish) with the adoption of the 3.p.s.
When conjugating -ja verbs, the single j must be removed, so syngja ('to sing') would become ég syng ('I sing') in the first person singular and not ég syngj (and syngja is a strong verb (past tense söng), so irregularities are to be expected).
The six primary conjugation classes are characterized as follow: This classification, with its focus on inflectional features rather than etymologies, leaves very few irregular verbs.
The compound tenses are: Icelandic possesses the middle voice in addition to both the active and passive.
Compare the verb breyta ('to change') to its middle voice forms, for example:[3] The middle voice form of many verbs carries a slightly different meaning, and in some cases may carry a different meaning altogether.
The middle voice is generally used in the following situations to express: Like many other Indo-European languages, Icelandic has the subjunctive mood.
The most frequent occurrence of this is determined by whether or not motion towards or away from is implied by the context: í, á, eftir, yfir and undir are all affected in this way.
The following examples demonstrate this: Here the preposition á governs the accusative case because specific motion towards/away from is implied, i.e. going to the restaurant.
In this example, the preposition á governs the dative; here the situation is static with no motion towards or away from implied.
Icelandic word order is SVO (subject–verb–object), generally speaking, with the subject and verb inverted in questions and when a sentence begins with an adverb.
For example, the finite verb must always be the second constituent of declarative sentences (this is a feature known as V2 word order, as is common to many Germanic languages).
For example: can be made into a question as follows: The inversion rule still applies when interrogatives are involved, which are simply added to the front of the sentence.
The meaning of a sentence does not change whether hvers vegna or af hverju is used; however they are used in a specific manner in Icelandic.
Although u-umlaut used to be completely regular in that every a followed by u was changed to ö, now there are new u's that don't trigger it from the Old Norse -r ending.
Take the verb hafa ('to have'), for example: In the singular conjugation, the I-umlaut has caused the stem a to become an e. If we look at the plural conjugation however, we can see that the stem a remains intact here, with the notable exception of the 'við' form, where a U-umlaut has taken place (thanks to the -um ending).
Having mentioned reversed or non-productive umlauts above, it remains to be stressed that the I- and U-umlauts are very much alive, both as a fixture of the declension system as well as being useful tools for composing neologisms.
A form of elision occurs when asking questions in the second person; the verb and þú have a tendency to merge to ease pronunciation.
This is reflected in writing, and so one would more often encounter talarðu as opposed to the expanded form talar þú.