Icelandic Language - Grammar

Grammar

Icelandic retains many grammatical features of other ancient Germanic languages, and resembles Old Norwegian before much of its fusional inflection was lost. Modern Icelandic is still a heavily inflected language with four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. Icelandic nouns can have one of three grammatical genders—masculine, feminine or neuter. There are two main declension paradigms for each gender: strong and weak nouns, which are furthermore divided in sub-classes of nouns, based primarily on the genitive singular and nominative plural ending of a particular noun. For example, within the masculine nouns that have a strong declension, there is a sub-class (class 1) that declines with an -s (Hests) in the genitive singular and -ar (Hestar) in the nominative plural. However there is another sub-class (class 3) of strong masculine nouns that always declines with -ar (Hlutar) in the genitive singular and -ir (Hlutir) in the nominative plural. Additionally, Icelandic permits a quirky subject, which is a phenomenon whereby certain verbs specify that their subjects are to be in a case other than the nominative.

Nouns, adjectives and pronouns are declined in the four cases, and for number in the singular and plural. T-V distinction ("þérun") in modern Icelandic seems on the verge of extinction, yet can still be found, especially in structured official address and traditional phrases.

Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood, person, number and voice. There are three voices: active, passive and middle (or medial); but it may be debated whether the middle voice is a voice or simply an independent class of verbs of its own (because every middle-voice verb has an active ancestor but concomitant are sometimes drastic changes in meaning, and the fact that the middle-voice verbs form a conjugation group of their own). Examples might be koma (come) vs. komast (get there), drepa (kill) vs. drepast (perish ignominiously) and taka (take) vs. takast (manage to). In every case mentioned the meaning has been so altered, that one can hardly see them as the same verb in different voices. They have up to ten tenses, but Icelandic, like English, forms most of these with auxiliary verbs. There are three or four main groups of weak verbs in Icelandic, depending on whether one takes a historical or formalistic view.: -a, -i, and -ur, referring to the endings that these verbs take when conjugated in the first person singular present. Some Icelandic infinitives end with the -ja suffix, some with á, two with u (munu, skulu) one with o (þvo-wash) and one with e (the Danish borrowing ske which is probably withdrawing its presence). For many verbs that require an object, a reflexive pronoun can be used instead. The case of the pronoun depends on the case that the verb governs. As for further classification of verbs, Icelandic behaves much like other Germanic languages, with a main division between weak verbs and strong, and the class of strong verbs, few as they may be (ca. 150-200) is divided into six plus reduplicative verbs. They still make up some of the most frequently used verbs. (Að vera, to be is the example par excellence, possessing two subjunctives and two imperatives in addition to being made up of different stems.) There is also a class of auxiliary verbs, a class called the -ri verbs (4-5 depending who is counting) and then the oddity að valda (to cause), called the only totally irregular verb in Icelandic, although each and every form of it is caused by common and regular sound changes.

The basic word order in Icelandic is subject–verb–object. However, as words are heavily inflected, the word order is fairly flexible and every combination may occur in poetry, i.e. SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OSV and OVS are all allowed for metrical purposes. However, as in German the conjugated verb in Icelandic usually appears second in the sentence, preceded by the word or phrase being emphasised. For example:

• Ég veit það ekki. (I don't know that.)
• Ekki veit ég það. (I do not know that.)
• Það veit ég ekki. (That I don't know.)

• Ég fór til Bretlands þegar ég var eins árs. (I went to the United Kingdom when I was one year old.)
• Til Bretlands fór ég þegar ég var eins árs. (To the United Kingdom went I, when I was one year old.)
• Þegar ég var eins árs fór ég til Bretlands. (When I was one year old, I went to the United Kingdom.)

In the above examples, the conjugated verbs veit and fór are always the second element in their respective sentences.