Wikibooks: Icelandic/Grammar/Adjectives
Icelandic contents Lýsingarorð Adjectives Adjectives are words that add description to a person place thing or idea. For example Reykjavík is beautiful . Cars pollute but are essential . When you are sad think of good memories. In Icelandic these take on endings and inflections like verbs and person...
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| Online Access: | https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Icelandic/Grammar/Adjectives |
| Summary: | Icelandic contents Lýsingarorð Adjectives Adjectives are words that add description to a person place thing or idea. For example Reykjavík is beautiful . Cars pollute but are essential . When you are sad think of good memories. In Icelandic these take on endings and inflections like verbs and personal pronouns do in English. = Case gender and number = In Icelandic adjectives are inflected for gender and case. Most Icelandic dictionaries will give the masculine form of the adjective by default. Adjectives usually end in ur in the masculine nominative. = Typical adjective inflections = = Strong vs. weak adjectives = Case gender and number are not the only ways that adjectives are declined in Icelandic. The strong form of an adjective is used when its meaning is not modified by the definite article while the weak form is used when the meaning is modified. Examples svart ur kött ur a black cat . Here the definite article is not used at all so the adjective would be in the strong form. svart i kött urinn the black cat . Here the adjective is used to say which cat the speaker is referring to not to provide additional information. Therefore the weak form of the adjective is used. Kött urinn er svart ur . The cat is black. . Here even though the noun is in the definite the adjective s meaning is not changed by the definite article so the strong form is used. = Inflection = The inflection table above shows the strong forms of the adjectives. This is how adjectives are declined in the weak form. =Comparative and superlative adjectives= In Icelandic as in with most other languages adjectives have a positive comparative and superlative degree. Examples My car is bigger than yours. (comparative) Reykjavík is the largest city in Iceland (superlative) =Inflection= The comparative does not have separate strong/weak forms. =Forming adjectives from nouns or verbs= legur (cognate with English like ) is the most common suffix added to a noun or verb to form an adjective. Examples persónu legur personal. from persóna ... |
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