Learn Icelandic On the Web - Lesson One Lesson One - Fyrsti Kafli   Here are three Icelandic sentences. Maður er ríkur. Strákur er ungur. Hnífur er langur. A man is rich. A boy is young. A knife is long. From these sentences, we can deduce several things about Icelandic grammar. er appears to be the equivalent of the English copula, "is." The nouns and adjectives all end in -ur. There seems to be no indefinite article. The word order is similar to that of English. With a few stipulations, these observations will hold true for the rest of our study of Icelandic. Let's examine some more sentences. Kona er rík. Stelpa er ung. Saga er löng. A woman is rich. A girl is young. A saga is long. Some more observations, as these sentences are a little bit different than the ones above. The word er is the same, with the same meaning. These nouns all end in -a. The forms of the adjectives do not have the ending -ur. The word löng has an ö. We have three more sentences to look at. HÅ›s er gult. Barn er ungt. Skip er langt. A house is yellow. A child is young. A ship is long. From these last sentences we can see that: These adjectives have -t. The word er remains ever the same. The nouns have no specific ending as in the two groups of sentences above. All of these observations are accurate, and together they tell us a great deal about the way the Icelandic language works. We can deduce from the first two groups of sentences that they refer to males and females, respectively. That leads us to assume that Icelandic has grammatical gender, which it does. The lack of an ending on the adjectives referring to females also leads us to believe that adjectives decline according to gender, with the adjectives of the masculine gender taking -ur, and the adjectives of the feminine gender taking no ending. The complete difference of the forms for the third goup of sentences from those of the first two leads us to assume that these nouns refer to beings or things neither male nor female, and thus neuter. Also, the ending -t reinforces our belief that adjectives decline for gender, and that it is the neuter form. The word er, which we take to mean "is," does not change from gender to gender. Conclusions: Icelandic has three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Masculine nouns and adjectives end in -ur. Feminine nouns end in -a; adjectives are without ending. Neuter nouns end in any consonant; adjectives end in -t. Adjectives agree in gender with their head noun. er is the Icelandic copula of the third person singular, regardless of gender. In future, we will learn much more about Icelandic nouns and adjectives, but for now our observations will hold. Introduction  |  Lesson Two  |  Glossary  |  References  |  E-mail me