# Icelandic: Hann var Vikingr



## Wasdoog

In Old Icelandic, according to a history book I'm reading, "Hann var Vikingr" means "he was a viking". But where is the indefinite article? Google says something about postfixed articles, which is both interesting and plausible, but Vikingr looks pretty much like "Viking".

Thanks.


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## Silver_Biscuit

There are no indefinite articles in modern Icelandic or Old Norse, only definite articles. So if you see the noun without the article, it's indefinite. 

Definite articles are indeed postfixed, so in modern Icelandic (sorry I'm no expert on Old Norse) he was *the* viking would be 'Hann var víkingur*inn*'.

Definite articles can also be separate and appear before the noun, like in English, and I believe this was more common in Old Norse than in modern Icelandic. That formulation would be 'Hann var *hinn* víkingur'. N.B. That sounds pretty strange for modern Icelandic, but maybe it would work in Old Norse.


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## Wasdoog

Silver_Biscuit said:


> There are no indefinite articles in modern Icelandic or Old Norse, only definite articles. So if you see the noun without the article, it's indefinite.
> 
> Definite articles are indeed postfixed, so in modern Icelandic (sorry I'm no expert on Old Norse) he was *the* viking would be 'Hann var víkingur*inn*'.



So, it's not just that sentence, but a general rule. I wonder how it ended up like that!


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## Silver_Biscuit

Wasdoog said:


> So, it's not just that sentence, but a general rule. I wonder how it ended up like that!



There is a poster on here called Alex who knows a lot about the history of languages, and he might be able to tell you. However, I would _guess_ that Old English used to be the same and we later added indefinite articles. So I would rather ask, how did English come to have indefinite articles? But I am only speculating here, I do not know for sure.


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## Wasdoog

1066 Norman Invasion changed many things about the language, and my dear friend the French language certainly has all sorts of indefinite articles, but I'm also in the dark.


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## Silver_Biscuit

I think most (possibly all except for Icelandic? and maybe Faroese?) modern Germanic languages feature indefinite articles, not just English. Since most of Northern Europe was _not_ invaded and colonised by a Romance language speaking people, I don't think we can blame the Normans. I would speculate that it probably rather has something to do with grammatical simplification in terms of noun declension, which I believe most Germanic languages have in common, the exceptions being Icelandic and Faroese.


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## Tjahzi

Wasdoog said:


> So, it's not just that sentence, but a general rule. I wonder how it ended up like that!


Silver Biscuit pretty much explained it, but I'll just expand a little. 

Initially, there were no articles and no distinction was made between definite and indefinite (which is still the case in the majority of the languages around the world). 

In the Romance languages and West Germanic languages, the demonstrative pronoun _that_ developed into a definite article that preceded the noun in question while the same process in the North Germanic languages resulted in an article which was attached to the end of/followed the noun (initially, it was arbitrary whether it followed or preceded, but eventually the latter became standard). Why the North Germanic languages "opted" for suffixation is obviously hard to tell, but the fact that they were fairly inflecting and head-initial could be explanations, but I'm just speculating here.

As for the indefinite articles (which technically aren't really necessary once we have a method to mark definiteness), they all seem to be (or in the case of English, originate from) the numeral _one_ in all European IE languages. However, while Icelandic (but not Faroese, interestingly enough) lacks an indefinite article while all neighboring languages with definite articles seem to have one is hard to tell, or maybe it is the very fact that is has no neighbors, in the true sense of the word. (Then again, I think the question "Why do all these other languages have an indefinite article?" is actually more valid.)


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## Sepia

It seems to me that those Indo-European languages that lost the case-suffixes of nouns developed articles. In high German even articles that mark the case. (Not that I can figure out why that would create a necessity for them ...)


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## Ben Jamin

Languages that have no system of definite and indefinite articles (for example almost all Slavic languages) mark definiteness and indefiniteness is other ways, albeit not so often and consistently as the "article langauges" but mostly there where the speaker feels a need for that. This is quite noticeable for example in Polish in colloquial speech (bordering on slang) especially when retelling a story from a book or film.
So, in languages that developed a set of indefinite articles there must have been a strong urge to mark indefiniteness, supposedly stronger than in others.


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