Icelandic - The Rough Guide to Iceland - page 334

Icelandic
Icelandic is an oddly archaic language, heavy with declensions, genders and
cases, not to mention Norse peculiarities. Whereas the other principal
members of the North Germanic group of languages, Danish, Norwegian
and Swedish, lost much of their grammar over time, Icelandic has proudly
maintained features that make even the most polyglottal language student
cough and splutter. It is also one of the most linguistically pure languages in
Europe in terms of vocabulary, and a campaign to rid the language of foreign
(mostly English) words has led to the coining of many new, purely Icelandic
words and phrases, devised by a committee of linguistic experts. Modern
inventions especially have been given names from existing Icelandic words,
such as sími for telephone (literally “long thread”), hence farsími (“travelling
long thread”) for “mobile phone”, and tölva (“number prophetess”) for
computer; and even fara á puttanu (“to travel on the thumb”) for “to
hitchhike”. Perhaps worryingly there's no Icelandic word for “interesting”, the
closest term being gaman - “fun”. Icelandic has also maintained many old
names for European cities that were in use at the time of the Settlement,
such as Dyflinni (Dublin), Jórvík (York, in Britain, hence Nýa Jórvík for New
York) and Lundúnir (London).
Anyone learning Icelandic will also have to grapple with a mind-blowing use of
grammatical cases for the most straightforward of activities: “to open a door”, for
instance, requires the accusative case ( opna dyrnar ), while “to close a door” takes the
dative case ( loka dyrunum ). Not only that, but “door” is plural in Icelandic, as is the
word for Christmas, jólin , hence jólin eru í desember , literally “Christmasses are in
December” (as opposed to the English “Christmas is in December”). Thankfully, there
are no dialects anywhere in the country.
Basic grammar
here are 32 letters in the Icelandic alphabet. Accented á, é, í, ó, ú and ý count as
separate letters. Letters Þ/þ, Æ/æ and Ö/ö come at the end of the alphabet in that
order, while Ð/ð comes after d. Hence a dictionary entry for mögulegur comes after
morgunn .
Verbs come in many classes and are either strong and characterized by a vowel change
( tek , tók , tekinn : “take”, “took”, “taken”) or weak ( tala , talaði : “speak”, “spoke”),
without a vowel shift. Verb endings agree with pronouns , which are as follows: ég (“I”),
þú (“you”, singular), hann (“he”), hún (“she”), það (“it”), við (“we”), þið (“you”, plural),
þeir (“you”, masculine plural), þaer (“you”, feminine plural), þau (“you”, neuter or
mixed gender plural).
Icelandic nouns can have one of three genders (masculine, feminine or neuter) and
can appear in any one of four different grammatical cases (nominative, accusative,
genitive and dative). For example, the masculine word jörður , meaning “a fjord”, is
jörður in the nominative case, jörð in the accusative case, jarðar in the genitive and
firði in the dative case. The case of a noun is determined by many factors, including the