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Icelandic grammar is the set of structural rules that describe the use of the Icelandic language.. Icelandic is a heavily inflected language.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 Icelandic grammar, the ri-verbs (Icelandic: ri-sagnir) are the four verbs in the language that have a -ri suffix in the past tense as opposed to a suffix containing a dental consonant such as /d/, /ð/, or /t/. Along with the preterite-present verbs (e.g. kunna and eiga), they are the only verbs which inflect with a mixed conjugation
Like other Germanic languages, Icelandic words have a tendency to be compounded. This means that many small component words can be connected together to create a word with a new meaning. Take the example to right, hlutabréfamarkaður (‘stock market’), which is made from the words hluti (‘share’), bréf (‘paper’) and markaður ...
Verbs have up to ten tenses, but Icelandic, like English, forms most of them with auxiliary verbs. There are three or four main groups of weak verbs in Icelandic, depending on whether one takes a historical or a formalistic view: -a, -i, and -ur, referring to the endings that these verbs take when conjugated in the first person singular present.
A kenning (Old English kenning [cʰɛnːiŋɡ], Modern Icelandic [cʰɛnːiŋk]) is a circumlocution, an ambiguous or roundabout figure of speech, used instead of an ordinary noun in Old Norse, Old English, and later Icelandic poetry. This list is not intended to be comprehensive. Kennings for a particular character are listed in that character ...
The vowel length is determined by the consonants that follow the vowel: if there is only one consonant before another vowel or at the end of a word (i.e., CVCV or CVC# syllable structure), the vowel is long; if there are more than one (CVCCV), counting geminates and pre-aspirated stops as CC, the vowel is short. There are, however, some ...
vökva [ˈvœːkva] ('water' verb) g shows a peculiar behavior. If we have the combination V+gi, then the vowel V is short and the gi is then pronounced [jɪ]. Additionally, non-diphthong vowels (besides /i/ and /u/) become diphthongs ending in /i/. In the combinations V+g+V (the second vowel not being i) the first vowel is long and g is ...
Sapir and Zuckermann (2008) demonstrate how Icelandic "camouflages" many English words by means of phono-semantic matching. [3] For example, the Icelandic-looking word eyðni, meaning "AIDS", is a phonosemantic match of the English acronym AIDS, using the existing Icelandic verb eyða ("to destroy") and the Icelandic nominal suffix -ni.