If your native language doesn’t have grammatical cases, you may find the idea hard to understand at first, but it will make sense soon. Declensions will still be a nightmare for some time though.
First of all, what purpose do the cases serve? They represent the role of the words in a sentence. English is an analytic language, which means that the relationship between the words in a sentence is primarily conveyed by word order and helper words rather than inflections (changing the form of the words in order to indicate a different role). Icelandic, on the other hand, depends heavily on inflections and has 4 grammatical cases – nominative, accusative, dative and genitive (nefnifall, þolfall, þágufall og eignarfall). Nouns, pronouns, adjectives and some numerals are declined according to the gender, number and grammatical case.
The English language still has remnants of the Old English case system, which has also depended on inflections. The pronouns are often pointed out as remnants of this system. The pronouns cases are three – subjective, objective and possessive (corresponding to the nominative, accusative and genitive cases in Old English).
If you think of I, me and my like three forms of the same word (I), which represent different roles of the words in the sentence – subject, object and ownership, then you already have a good idea what the cases are. It’s just that in English these are exceptions and don’t apply to most of the nouns as opposed to Icelandic, where every noun is declined in the four cases.
Let’s take for example sentences in English and compare it with their Icelandic equivalents so you can see the difference:
- The dog is hungry. Hundurinn er svangur.
- I think about the dog. Ég hugsa um hundinn.
- I gave food to the dog. Ég gaf hundinum mat.
- This is the dog‘s owner. Þetta er eigandi hundsins.
The declension of hundur is as it follows:
As you can see, the role of the dog in these sentences is as it follows: subject, direct object, indirect object, noun–main-noun relationship (in this case possession). In English, although the role is different, the form of the word remains the same. In Icelandic, on the other hand, the form changes in order to indicate the role of the word in these sentences. The definite article is being added to the declined form at the end of the word, but this is a topic for another post.
Now that you know what the function of the cases is, let’s take a look at how they are being used and what are the functions of each one of them.
Cases – main functions:
- Nefnifall (Nominative case )
It indicates the subject of the sentence – the person or thing, doing the action. If the verb is passive, it is the noun receiving the action. All nouns appear in the dictionary in the nominative case.
- Þolfall (Accusative case)
The accusative case is used for direct objects – nouns that are having something done to them. In order to find this noun in the sentence, you must ask the question “What?”
- Þágufall (Dative case)
The indirect object of a sentence is the recipient of the direct object. To find the indirect object, ask who the recipient of the direct object is.
- Eignarfall (Genitive case)
The genitive case usually indicates the relationship, which a noun has to the main noun in a sentence. This relationship could include possession, origin, compound words, reference, description, substance, elements. In English, these are usually conveyed by adding “’s” to the word or by preceding it with of.
You would think that knowing these functions is all you need. I will disappoint you – it is a good start, but some verbs and prepositions require specific cases and many times they are contradictory to the main functions of each of the cases.
So, to be able to use nouns in a sentence properly, you should know two things: which case to use and how to put the noun in the right form (to decline it).
I love Icelandic 