Icelandic grammar

Icelandic grammar is a body of rules specifying how meanings are created in Icelandic. Icelandic is an inflected language with four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. Icelandic nouns can have one of three grammatical genders, masculine, feminine or neuter. Nouns, adjectives and pronouns are declined in four cases and two numbers, singular and plural.

Morphology

Many German speakers will find Icelandic morphology familiar. Almost every morphological category in one language is represented in the other. Nouns are declined for case, number and gender; adjectives for case, number, gender and comparison; and there are two declensions for adjectives, weak and strong. Icelandic possesses only the definite article, which can stand on its own, or be attached to its modified noun (as in other North Germanic languages). Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood, person, number and voice. There are three voices: active, passive and medial; but it may be debated whether the medial voice is a voice or simply an independent class of verbs. There are only two simple tenses, past and present, but to make up for that there are a number of auxiliary constructions, some of which may be regarded as tenses, others as aspects to varying degrees [Jón Friðjónsson (1989). "Samsettar myndir sagna", Málvísindastofnun Háskóla Íslands, Reykjavík.] [Kress, Bruno (1982). "Isländische Grammatik", VEB Verlag Enzyklopädie Leipzig.] .

Nouns

Icelandic nouns are much like Old Norse, both in form and inflection. They decline in four cases (nominative, accusative, dative and genitive) and vary in gender (masculine, feminine or neuter) and number (singular and plural). There are two main declension paradigms for each gender: strong and weak nouns, which are furthermore divided in smaller paradigms for declension, according to many criteria (sound-shifts, consonant clusters, etc.) Following are four examples of strong declension. "Glas" means the drinking vessel glass, "gler" means the material glass. Those are etymologically the same words, but "glas" is a borrowing and "gler" is native. The "(j)" in the declension of "gler" means that the "j" is a later intrusion.

Icelandic has separate masculine, feminine and neuter words for "they"; when talking about a group of mixed gender people or items, the neuter form is used.

Like English, the pronoun usually comes before the verb, as in the example below::"ég heiti Magnús"—"I am called Magnús"But, just as easily, the order of the sentence may be inverted. In this case, the pronoun moves to the end of the sentence::"Magnús heiti ég"—"Magnús I am called" (or, literally "Magnús called I am")In English, changing of the word order like this would render a phrase nonsensical. This is mainly due to the fact that whilst being a Germanic language, English has lost most of its noun declension. See syntax for more information.

Reflexive

Icelandic possesses a reflexive pronoun, functioning in much the same way as German "sich". The nominative case does not exist.

where the three columns for each person represent masculine, feminine and neuter genders respectively. "Þessi" and "sá" roughly correspond to "this/that" and "hinn" means "the other one of two".

Indefinite

There are around fifteen to twenty of these, depending on who is counting. For argument’s sake, paradigm for "enginn" ("nobody") is given below. It is inflected thus:
-|

Other numbers are as follows and not declined except for those which are actually nouns:

An example of weak declension::"Ég sá veiku konuna"—"I saw the sick woman""Veiku" is the weak declension of "veikur" ("sick") in the accusative singular. "Konuna" is also accusative singular, but with the definite article attached ("-na"), and the article forces the adjective to be weak. Here the verb governs the case.

Here, at least, there are far fewer forms to learn, three in all, although one has to learn, of course, how they are distributed.

Verbs

As with most inflected languages, the verbs in Icelandic determine (or governs) the case of the subsequent nouns, pronouns and adjectives of a sentence. For example:

* "Safna" ('to collect or save') governs the dative case.

: Ég er að safna peningum til þess að geta keypt jólagjöf handa mömmu. : "I am saving money to be able to buy a Christmas gift for Mum." (Peningum is the dative plural form of peningur (coin))

* "Sakna" ('to miss') governs the genitive case

: Ég sakna þín: "I miss you"

In the infinitive, most Icelandic verbs end in -a. The exceptions are a few verbs ending in -á, for instance "slá" (‘hit’), "flá" (‘flay’) amongst various others, the auxiliaries "munu" and "skulu", "þvo" ("wash"), originally "þvá" and the (frowned upon by purists) borrowing (from Danish) "ske" ("happen"). The two auxiliaries are important, since they turn up in various places to make up for the poverty of simple tenses. "Þvo" is, of course, very common, but "ske" can be avoided altogether. There are three main groups of weak verbs in Icelandic: -ar, -ir, and -ur, referring to the endings that these verbs take when conjugated in the third person singular present. The strong verbs and the irregular verbs ("auxiliaries", "ri-verbs" and "valda") are a separate matter. Take the infinitive "tala" (‘to talk’), for example:

And finally "velja" (‘to choose’), which is an -ur verb:

yntax

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. However, the inflectional system allows for considerable freedom in word order.

Despite this, there are certain rules of syntax which are relatively inflexible. For example, the main verb must always be the second lexical unit of the sentence (this is a feature known as V2 word order, as is common to many Germanic languages). Take the example below (subject in yellow, verb in blue, object in red)::"Mannfjöldinn var 1.500"—"The population was 1,500"Here the element "var" (the past tense third person singular form of the verb "vera", ‘to be’, i.e. ‘was’) is the second lexical unit of the sentence. If we change the sentence, however::"Árið 2000 var mannfjöldinn 1.500"—"In 2000, the population was 1,500" (lit. "The year 2000 was the population 1,500")Here, "var" is still the second lexical unit of the sentence, despite the fact that it is not the second "word" in the sentence. The prepositional phrase "árið 2000" (highlighted in green) counts as one lexical unit, and so in order for the verb to be the second lexical unit it must come after "2000" and not after "árið". The subject and object of the verb then follow. An exception to this rule arises when forming questions by inversion::"Stefán er svangur"—"Stefán is hungry"and when turned into a question::"Er Stefán svangur?"—"Is Stefán hungry?"Here the subject and verb have been inverted to form a question, meaning the verb is the first lexical unit in the sentence as opposed to the second. This method of forming questions is used in many languages, including English.

Questions

As we have seen, questions can be easily formed by rearranging the order of the sentence from subject-verb-object to verb-subject-object. For example:: "Þú talar íslensku."—"You speak Icelandic."can be made into a question as follows:: "Talar þú íslensku?"—"Do you speak Icelandic?" (lit. "Speak you Icelandic?")It should be noted that often a form of elision occurs when asking questions in the second person; the verb and "þú" have a tendency to merge together to ease pronunciation. This is reflected in writing, and so one would more often encounter "talarðu" as opposed to the expanded form "talar þú". The actual change undergone here is the transformation of the voiceless dental fricative "þ" into the voiced dental fricative "ð". This elision rule applies to many verbs, some having their own special forms (for example "vera", ‘to be’, has the form "ertu"). [cite book | last = Neijmann | first = Daisy | title = Colloquial Icelandic | publisher = Routledge | date = 2001 | pages = 21 | isbn = 0415207061 ]

The inversion rule still applies when interrogatives are involved, which are simply added to the front of the sentence. The interrogatives in Icelandic are:
*"hvað?"—"what/how?"
**Hvað ert þú að gera?—"What are you doing?" (lit. "What are you to do?")
*"hvaða?"—"what?"
**Hvaða hundur?—"What dog?"
*"hver?"—"who?"
**Hver ert þú?—"Who are you?"
*"hvernig?"—"how?"
**Hvernig hefur þú það?—"How are you?" (lit. "How have you it?")
*"hvar/hvert/hvaðan?"—"where/whence?"
**Hvar ert þú?—"Where are you?"
**Hvert ert þú að fara—"Where are you going?" (lit. "Where are you to go?")
**Hvaðan kemur þú?—"Where do you come from?" (lit. "Whence come you?")
*"hvenær?"—"when?"
**Hvenær kemur þú?—"When do you come?" (lit. "When come you?")
*"hvers vegna/af hverju/hví?"—"why?"
**Hvers vegna hann?—"Why him?"
**Af hverju ekki?—"Why not?"
**Hví?—"Why?"
*"hvort?"—"whether/which?"
**Hvort hann komi, veit ég ekki.—"I don’t know whether he’s coming or not." (lit. "Whether he comes, know I not.")
**Hvort vilt þú?—"Which do you want?" (lit. "Which want you?", implying a choice between two alternatives.)

However, interrogative pronouns ("hvað/hver") must decline with the verb that they modify, so the case of the pronoun will change depending on the verb. 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. Also of note, "hví" is rarely used.

ound shifts

There are a number of sound shifts that occur in Icelandic, detailed below. The shifts occur very frequently across all word classes. For one of the most thorough books about the subject see "Íslenzk málfræði handa æðri skólum" [Halldór Halldórsson (1950). "Íslenzk málfræði handa æðri skólum". Ísafoldarprentsmiðja h.f., Reykjavík.] .

A-umlaut

This is the oldest umlaut of all, attested in every Germanic language except, perhaps, Gothic. It comes in two varieties:

:i ⇒ e (as for instance in niður vs. neðan).:u ⇒ o. Well known examples include fugl (cf. English fowl) or stofa (cf. German Stube).

This umlaut is no longer productive.

U-umlaut

The U-umlaut occurs when a stem vowel "a" changes to "ö" because of a "u" in the next syllable. This affects "a" only, and not "á" or "au". Some examples::t"a"la—"talk" ⇒ (við) t"ö"lum—"(we) talk":f"a"ra—"go" ⇒ (við) f"ö"rum—"(we) go"If there is an intermediate syllable between the first "a" and the "u", then the U-shift does not take place.

U-umlaut is not to be confused with breaking although they appear similar.

Note that if there are two "a's" preceding the "u", the first "a" becomes an "ö" and the second becomes a "u". An example::fagnaður—"joy" ⇒ fögnuðum—"joys" (dative, plural).

Exceptions to this include several borrowings, for instance banani—"banana" ⇒ banönum (dative plural) and Arabi—"Arab" ⇒ Aröbum (also dative plural).

Historically, there were four more additional forms of the U-umlaut; these are no longer productive or have been reversed.

I-umlaut

The I-umlaut is slightly more complex, and consists of the following vowel changes::a ⇒ e:á ⇒ æ:e ⇒ i:o ⇒ e:ó ⇒ æ:u ⇒ y (It sometimes appears as if o ⇒ y, but this is never the case. An example: Sonur (singular) ⇒ synir (plural) might give the impression of an I-umlaut, but the original vowel in sonur was u changed to o by the A-umlaut.):ú, jú and jó ⇒ ý:au ⇒ ey

Less known, non-productive and reversed changes include::o ⇒ ø:ǫ ⇒ ø

Other umlauts

Historically, there were many more umlauts in Icelandic, including
* IR-umlaut
* J-umlaut
* R-umlaut
* G-k-umlaut
* W-umlaut

These are much more limited in scope, and operate more or less in the same way as the above mentioned umlauts (i.e. have more or less the same effect). 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. This applies to breaking as well.

References

External links

* [http://www.hum.uit.no/a/svenonius/lingua/flow/li/minig/enmini_is.html An Icelandic minigrammar] , Intercomprehension in Germanic Languages Online / University of Tromsø, 2003.
* [http://mimir.dettifoss.org/ Mimir - Online Icelandic grammar notebook]
* [http://www.verbix.com/languages/icelandic.shtml Verbix - an online Icelandic verb conjugator]
* [http://iceland.spurl.net/tunga/VO/ An online declension tool for Icelandic words]