# Icelandic: að vera eitthvað sem þér mislikar!



## Alxmrphi

Hi all,

A section from "Colloquial Icelandic", goes like this:



> *EINAR*: En eru Íslendingar ekki frekar lokaðir, að þínu mati?
> *HILTON*: Til að byrja með kannski, en það lagast fljótlega, sérstaklega þegar maður fer út að skemmta sér með Íslendingum! Þá losnar fólkið við feimni, verður sama um allt og hugsar bara um að skemmta sér. Það líkar mér vel við, lifa fyrir augnablikið og njóta þess sem mest!
> *EINAR*: En það hlýtur að vera eitthvað sem þér mislikar!
> *HILTON*: Það er alltof kalt og dimmt á veturna. En þó, ég er alltaf hissa hvað það er mikið fjör og félagslíf einmitt þá. Það er alltaf eitthvað að gerast!


It just doesn't make sense to me, what am I missing, why would Einar reply with that last sentence, what's wrong with the statement? If someone said to me everyone goes out to enjoy themselves and live life in the moment I'd think it was good, but "sem þér mislikar" means "that annoys you / that you don't like" right?
The context is they've just met on a plane and there's no indication of this person being a particularly boring guy, but I think I might be missing something. Then he goes on to say what he doesn't like.....

Oooh I think it's just hit me, I read it as Það hlýtur að vera eitthvað sem... (it has to be something that...), but it's just occurred to me it could also mean *there has to be something that*... that must be what it is, right?
Could anyone confirm that? *Það* taking on the role of *it* and *there* is not logical to me!! I think the lack of a question mark threw me as well.

On a re-read of my post it's not clear what I first thought it might be, it seemed that Hilton's explanation was of all the good things and how everyone wants to enjoy themselves, then Einar's response looked (at first) like a statement saying this must not be something like Hilton likes, but now when thinking about it, given what he says next it makes more sense for Einar to say "there has to be something you don't like", though it does look like it could theoretically mean what I first assumed as well....

All I need is a confirmation because I do _not trust myself_ to come to final decisions on things like this....


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## Silver_Biscuit

Yep, I completely agree with your second instinct. I would translate it as: But there must be something you don't like!
Incidentally, even though that is given as the secondary definition of *að hljóta* in the digicoll dictionary, it is by far the most common usage that I come across in my oh-so-broad experience of Icelandic literature (er, one and a half novels...)


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## Brautryðjandinn í Úlfsham

Hello! I think that the other meaning of "að hljóta", that is, "to receive" is actually quite common. It's not hard at all to know when the verb means "must, be bound to" and when it means "to receive" because I think when it means "must, be bound to" it always is followed by a verb. I think the "að hljóta" when it means "to receive" is often used when talking about awards. For example,
Hann hlaut fyrstu verðlaun. = He got first prize.
I think you might even be able to use both meanings of the verb in the same phrase like this:
Hann hlýtur að hafa hlotið fyrstu verðlaun.
But maybe that sentence isn't so good because it might sound bad to repeat the verb "að hljóta". Could an Icelander please confirm if it is correct? Thank you!


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## Alxmrphi

> because I think when it means "must, be bound to" it always is followed by a verb.


I agree Braut, it's parallel to English, "must" & "have to". They would not make sense if a verb didn't follow, and if the meaning was 'to receive', without a noun following it wouldn't make sense. The_ linguistic categorisation_ of the successive _sentence constituent_ is the way in which the definition of the verb(s) is/are defined.

*Ég hlaut* bréf* í dag *- I *received* a letter today.
*Ég hlaut* að vinna *í dag* - I *had to* work today.

I'm also interested to know if your sentence works, from what I've gathered, repetition doesn't seem to be appreciated by Icelanders  Actually I haven't come across a language which seems to like it, except English of course, where you can have combinations like "_I had had_" and "_I like him like I like you_" or repetitions of the same verb in phrasal verbs which drives learners crazy.


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## Brautryðjandinn í Úlfsham

Hello, Alxmrphi!
I don't know if your second sentence is correct. I have the feeling that there's something not quite right about it. "Að hljóta" only means "must, have to" when it can be replaced by the phrase "to be bound to". For example:
He was bound to become the greatest musician. = Hann hlaut að verða mesti tónlistarmaðurinn.
I was bound to have worked yesterday. = Ég hlaut að hafa unnið í gær.
If you want to say 'I had to word today (that is, it is necessary that I do it) then I think you would say: "Ég þurfti að vinna í dag." or "Ég varð að vinna í dag."
But "I must have worked today because I am tired now" might be "Ég hlýt að hafa unnið í dag af því að ég er þreyttur núna."
Please note that I'm just a learner and this all could be wrong. Take everything I've written here with a grain of salt!


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## Alxmrphi

Yeah I realised the same about the second sentence after not being able to find something similar on Google. 
As for "*Ég hlaut að vinna*", it seems quite common on Google, and its sense I learnt as being an inevitable sense (though the gray area of shared meanings with all these verbs of requirement are, as is to be expected, significant) so might not always refer to that, but it is inevitable that we have to work to survive so why not  ?

I know what you mean by the 'bound to' thing, in linguistics that kind of verb is called an epistemic modal (based on judgements from the speaker's perspective when not referring back to the speaker, in a nutshell)

What you say makes a lot of sense, I hadn't really thought about modality in Icelandic as I'm still learning words like "cup" and "fire", but sometimes my mind wanders to other places but I've just looked into it and it seems you've got the right idea, making a deduction (epistemic modality) is what *að hljóta *seems to be used for, as in an example cited from Colloquial Icelandic: "_Þetta hlýtur að vera bróðir þinn, þið eruð svo lík_", in exactly that sense, reporting it as "in the sense when something is inevitable" is a bit misleading I think given what I know now.

As "hljóta" is also used by people reporting the past, it can't have that same type of meaning (because nobody makes judgements / assumptions based on one's own life) so I'm interested to know its scope of meaning like in the example "Ég hlaut að vinna" that's, well, 'used' on Google (1,000+ entries), in your sentence using it you've used a good example where you do make a deduction / personal judgement on your own life (I must be tired because...) so it works in senses like that.

Thanks Braut, I feel I've made quite a jump in how I view these kind of verbs now, thanks for your input! 
I think we'll need to write some questions to the natives to get the most out of their answers, I'll start off:

1) With 'hljóta' used to refer to the past (where there's no judgement / deducing) like in _Ég hlaut að gefa einhverjum eitthvað _(or whatever the correct way is), is this possible (grammatically correct) or do you only use it with the meaning of deducing? I'm not good enough at Icelandic to get a gist of the context in what I have searched for on Google, if it is fine, what does it mean to you, is it the same as_ Ég varð að gefa einhverjum eitthvað_?


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## Silver_Biscuit

Brautryðjandinn í Úlfsham said:


> Hello! I think that the other meaning of "að hljóta", that is, "to receive" is actually quite common.


 
I didn't say it was unusual, I just said that the 'must' meaning is much more common in my experience. It is after all more common to talk about things that must happen/be than to talk about the winning of prizes.

Weirdly I never really made the mental connection between hlaut and að hljóta. The meaning was always obvious from the context whenever I've come across it, so I never looked it up, just added it to my vocabulary as a word that means 'won' in the context of prizes. That might not be the best way to learn, but then I suppose that it is how I learnt English. I've mostly encountered this meaning in relation to literary prizes, but that's only because of the nature of the stuff that I read.


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## Brautryðjandinn í Úlfsham

Hello, Alxmrphi!
You know so much about grammar! Unfortunately I don't know so much about all the proper terminology and grammatical rules so I don't know if I can of much use to you. But one thing I have a intuition about is that the verb "að hafa" often is between the verb "að hljóta" and the verb that is bound to have taken place. For example:
He must (is bound to) own a lot of books. = Hann hlýtur að eiga margar bækur.
He must (is bound to) have owned a lot of books. = Hann hlýtur að hafa átt margar bækur.
He must (was bound to) own a lot of books = Hann hlaut að eiga margar.
He must (was bound to) have owned a lot of books = Hann hlaut að hafa átt margar bækur.
I think that the phrase "Hann hlaut að vinna" is correct but I don't know if you can say "hann hlaut að vinna í dag". Maybe it's because the word "hlaut" is referring to something that happened already so maybe you should say "ég hlaut að hafa unnið þann dag". And if you want to say "I must have worked today" I think the best translation might be "Ég hlýt að hafa unnið í dag" instead of "ég hlaut að vinna í dag" or "ég hlaut að hafa unnið í dag". An native speaker will have to help me with this because I'm really just speculating!


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## Silver_Biscuit

Brautryðjandinn í Úlfsham said:


> "Að hljóta" only means "must, have to" when it can be replaced by the phrase "to be bound to". For example:
> He was bound to become the greatest musician. = Hann hlaut að verða mesti tónlistarmaðurinn.
> I was bound to have worked yesterday. = Ég hlaut að hafa unnið í gær.
> If you want to say 'I had to word today (that is, it is necessary that I do it) then I think you would say: "Ég þurfti að vinna í dag." or "Ég varð að vinna í dag."
> But "I must have worked today because I am tired now" might be "Ég hlýt að hafa unnið í dag af því að ég er þreyttur núna."


 
I completely agree that when talking about things that you do under compulsion, að hljóta is not the right verb. I don't agree that it is only applicable when it can be replaced with 'to be bound to'. I've mostly come across it in the present tense, to mean 'must'. As in this short extract:


> "Halelúja!" hef ég eftir honum. Og það meira að segja hátt og snjallt. Hlýtur að vera bjórinn.
> ("Hallelujah!" I repeat after him. And what's more, loud and clear. Must be the beer.)


 
'It's bound to be the beer' is not great English in this context. Að hljóta can be used to express certainty about the future (or rather, past certainty about the present - he was bound to become a musician), but also to express certainty about connections between things in the present - the narrator is saying hallelujah because he is drunk.


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## Brautryðjandinn í Úlfsham

Silver_Biscuit said:


> I didn't say it was unusual, I just said that the 'must' meaning is much more common in my experience. It is after all more common to talk about things that must happen/be than to talk about the winning of prizes.
> 
> Weirdly I never really made the mental connection between hlaut and að hljóta. The meaning was always obvious from the context whenever I've come across it, so I never looked it up, just added it to my vocabulary as a word that means 'won' in the context of prizes. That might not be the best way to learn, but then I suppose that it is how I learnt English. I've mostly encountered this meaning in relation to literary prizes, but that's only because of the nature of the stuff that I read.



Hello, Silver_Biscuit!
I know what you mean with these verbs! I get confused a lot when there are a lot of vowel shifts and you can't easily draw the inflected form to the infinitive or nominative. Have you come across the word "ölturu" before? It's one of the strangest words I've seen in Icelandic! It's the plural of "altari" but it looks completely different! I didn't mean to discredit what you wrote about "að hljóta". I just wanted to bring attention to the other meaning.


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## Brautryðjandinn í Úlfsham

Silver_Biscuit said:


> I completely agree that when talking about things that you do under compulsion, að hljóta is not the right verb. I don't agree that it is only applicable when it can be replaced with 'to be bound to'. I've mostly come across it in the present tense, to mean 'must'. As in this short extract:
> 
> 
> 'It's bound to be the beer' is not great English in this context. Að hljóta can be used to express certainty about the future (or rather, past certainty about the present - he was bound to become a musician), but also to express certainty about connections between things in the present - the narrator is saying hallelujah because he is drunk.



I personally don't think it's wrong to say "it's bound to be the beer" in the example you gave. Maybe it's a matter of style. In American English "it's bound to" is correct in this context, at least in my opinion. But you are correct, you can't _*always*_ tanslate "að hljóta" as "to be bound to" in this kind of sentences but very often I believe you can. Thank you for pointing this out to me!


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## Brautryðjandinn í Úlfsham

I think one good reason to think sometimes of "að hljóta" as "to be bound to" is because of the following kind of sentences:
Það verður að vera sársaukafullt.
Það þarf að vera sársaukafullt.
Það hlýtur að vera sársaukafullt.
In the first two sentences it is a necessity for whatever is being talked about to be painful. In the last sentence the person who says the sentence is giving their opinion on the matter. All of the sentence could probably be accurately translated as 'It must be painful' into English but a more descriptive translation could be:
It must be painful.
It has to be painful.
It is bound to be painful.
I hope this helps!


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## Brautryðjandinn í Úlfsham

By the way, it seems that according to the Digicoll website dictionary 'að hljóta' can mean 'must, have to' in the sence of a necessity in the phrase 'ég hlýt að viðurkenna'. I don't understand this use of the verb. I think it's more common to say "ég verð að viðurkenna" but that might be a anglicized version of the phrase "I must admit".


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## Brautryðjandinn í Úlfsham

Alxmrphi said:


> 1) With 'hljóta' used to refer to the past (where there's no judgement / deducing) like in _Ég hlaut að gefa einhverjum eitthvað _(or whatever the correct way is), is this possible (grammatically correct) or do you only use it with the meaning of deducing? I'm not good enough at Icelandic to get a gist of the context in what I have searched for on Google, if it is fine, what does it mean to you, is it the same as_ Ég varð að gefa einhverjum eitthvað_?



The following is just my personal assumption so be highly skeptical about it!
I think that when 'hljóta' is used in the past tense it has the same core meaning of 'must, have to, be bound to' not 'must do something because its necessary'. But this can be tricky because in all tenses it's usually translated into English as "must" and "must" doesn't have a clear past tense. So when "hljóta' is in the past tense I think it means 'was bound to, had to' in English. I think that this meaning of the verb requires the next verb to be proceeded by either 'að vera', 'að hafa', 'að vera búin/n að' and perhaps "að verða" because it's dealing with something that happened even further in the past. So I think that you would have to say "ég hlaut að hafa gefið einhverjum eitthvað" That's also why I didn't think it was right to say "ég hlaut að vinna í dag". I think you'd have to say "ég hlýt að hafa unnið í dag" or "ég hlaut að hafa unnið þá/þann dag". Does this make any sense to you?


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