# Icelandic: Noun Classification



## Alxmrphi

Ok if I understand correctly, barely anyone here speaks Icelandic, right, but maybe this might be the case for someone else who speaks a norse languages, is Icelandic or can speak it or knows about it etc.

My understanding of it is:

Things in Icelandic can be "Strong" or "Weak" (nouns, verbs etc)
They are "strong" if all conjugations in the singular don't always retain the ending vowel when conjugated, if they do, then they are classified as "Weak":

I read this statement:



> Strong Masculine nouns are divided into four groups.
> Group 1 (hestur, hattur...)
> Group 2 (smiður, dalur...)
> Group 3 (hlutur, staður...)
> Group 4 (faðir, bróðir...)



But in those links it doesn't explain why there are four groups or what they represent?



> Strong Feminine nouns are divided into three groups.
> Group 1 (kerling, lifur...)
> Group 2 (tíð, gjöf...)
> Group 3 (bók, kýr...)



I'm just wondering about the characteristics of each "group" as it makes no sense without any explanation.


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## Lemminkäinen

Alex_Murphy said:


> I'm just wondering about the characteristics of each "group" as it makes no sense without any explanation.



The way I understood it, they're divided into groups by declination pattern. So for the first group of masculine nouns it says:



> Genitive Singular -s (-ar), Nominative Plural -ar.



While the second has:



> Genitive Singular -s (-jar), Nominative Plural -ir.



And so on.


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## Alxmrphi

So they are classed soley on the relationship between the endings of the genetive singular and nominative plural in each respective group?


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## Lemminkäinen

Well, it doesn't seem they're (the various groups, that is) similar to each other in the other cases, but that seems to be the classification, yes.


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## Outsider

It's like how Italian verbs are classified into conjugations: in -_are_, -_ire_, etc.


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## Alxmrphi

In Italian you have a group and you can see a verb and class it and know how it works.

With Icelandic, in nouns, the only groupings that seem to be consistant is the singular genetive ending and plural accusative.

It's not like there is a list of words and you pick pick out automatically what noun goes into what category like you can with Italian infinitives.

I think I'm gonna have to look for help outside WR here.


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## Outsider

Oh, the Germanic languages and their maddening irregularities...


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## Alxmrphi

I'm baaaaccckkk........

Ok, I want to make sure I understand this:

_*Nouns can be grouped into endings based on their genitive singular and nominative plural endings, and there are seventy three different patterns of endings for Icelandic nouns? And this is bar the plentiful irregularities?*_

Is this correct?


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## modus.irrealis

Seventy-three sounded very high so I looked it up in my grammar and ended up counting seventy-two example nouns that they give, so it does seem you're correct. But they are grouped into thirteen main classes (depending on genitive singular and nominative plural as you say) and within those classes the endings don't seem to vary too much and it seems like there's a lot of stuff that's predictable so it's not as bad as it looks.

For an example of what I mean, in the first masculine strong class (gen. sg. _-s_, nom. pl. _-ar_) it shows two different nouns _hestur_ and _hattur_ which use the exact same endings but the only difference is that the dative plurals are _hestum_ and _höttum_. But then it says that the dative plural of nouns with _a_ in the stem show "u-shift" of _a_ to _ö_ in the dative plural, so I wouldn't really say these are two _different_ patterns -- I'd say they're the same pattern except part of the rule for the dative plural only applies to those nouns with _a_ in the stem.

And then there's the irregularities, and my grammar has loads of them, but I guess that's the fun of inflectional languages .


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## Alxmrphi

Thanks!
It restored my confidence in trying!!


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