Why We Didn’t Learn Much Icelandic

 One word—declensions.  We just don’t have this grammatical feature in English, much.  We have definite and indefinite, singular and plural.  The following is taken from P.J.T.  Glendenning’s “Icelandic”, published in 1961:

      “It is sometimes said of Icelandic that “it has a lot of grammar”.  By this is meant that there is a great deal of so-called “formal grammar”, the form of words and their endings being changed according to circumstances.  In the case of Icelandic nouns, for example, we are up against division according to gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter), sub-division according to whether the noun is of the weak or strong variety, and further sub-division into various types (not forgetting the exceptions).  ….  The process does not stop with mere plural formation in Icelandic, by any means.  There exist four cases: the subject or nominative case, the object or accusative case, the dative case and the genitive or possessive case.”

Before you get too impressed, or depressed, by the following examples, you should know that Old English, from over 1000 years ago, was quite similar to the Old Dansk/Old Norse used by the Vikings that raided England, Ireland, Scotland, etc. Modern Icelandic is a slightly modernized version of Old Norse from the time when Iceland was extensively settled in 900s, mostly by Norwegian Vikings. Even today, the Norwegian dialect still used in some remote, isolated areas of northern Norway is reported to be so similar to Modern Icelandic as to be mutually understandable, with some effort. Happily, Modern Norwegian, Danish and Swedish have much simplified grammar, even more so than English.
Mr. Glendenning takes as his example the noun hestur (horse):

nom.   hér er hestur (here is (a) horse)      hér eru hestar (here are horses)
acc.   um hest (about a horse)                     um hesta (about some horses)
dat.   frá hesti (from a horse)                      frá hestum (from some horses)
gen.   til hests (to a horse)                           til hesta (to some horses) 

I’ll skip all the stuff about strong and weak forms of each of the three genders, and go on to the definite form  Note that it is common in the Scandinavian languages to attach the definite article to the end of the noun, although Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish use simpler patterns:

 nom.  hér er hesturinn (here is the horse)    hér eru hestarnir (here are the horses)
acc.  um hestinn (about the horse)               um hestana (about the horses)
dat.   frá hestinum (from the horse)              frá hestunum (from the horses)
gen.   til hestsins (to the horse)                    til hestanna (to the horses)

So—in case this is all gibberish, basically every noun has 16 forms, depending on how it is used in the sentence.  The patterns vary for strong and weak, and for masculine, feminine, and neuter.  So that’s a minimum of 6 different declension patterns….except there are exceptions.  LOTS of exceptions.  Icelandic is a very old language, and nobody has ever said “Hey, let’s have all the strong masculine nouns act this way, and all the weak ones act this other way.”  Turns out, there are 73 different patterns of nouns, each with the 16 forms above…..I pretty much gave up once I learned that.

Aside from that, you have to learn which prepositions govern which case.  And the adjectives and adverbs have to agree with the nouns.  Compared to this, verbs are pretty easy.

Lars, knowing Russian, which has 6 cases, didn’t have as much trouble as I with this feature. By comparison, modern Russian declensions, verb forms and prepositions are a model of orderly simplicity. But we both struggle somewhat with the fact that lots of words that look familiar to us from Swedish, turn out to mean something completely different in Icelandic.  And the sounds aren’t the same, quite.  Lars can pick up quite a bit by reading it; I can kind of get the general idea of the topic, sometimes, but not much more.

It’s a good thing that English is extensively used by Icelanders, especially the younger generation. Lars sometimes exchanges letters or emails with older Icelanders – he writes in generic Swedish and they use the Danish that they learned in school. Iceland was under Danish rule for centuries. With younger Icelanders it is pretty much English all the way.