Tag Archives: vocabulary
Móðir mín í kví, kví. Posted by hulda on May 27, 2012
“Icelandic ghosts are so different from the ones in my homecountry”, a classmate of mine told me once while explaining why she wanted to write her þjóðsögur ritgerð, folk tales essay, about them. Even having a completely different background I had to agree. Icelandic ghosts, draugar, are really a type of their own. They can be…
Affixes and Compounds Posted by sequoia on May 19, 2012
This is a companion to the post about compound words that I made earlier. Sometimes Icelandic words are often made of more than one stem/root words at once, along with suffixes, infixes (like a suffix or prefix but in the middle of words), et cetera. This means they’re compound words but not necessarily compounds that…
When the volcanoes wake up. Posted by hulda on May 16, 2012
As the weather gets warmer yet another very Icelandic feature begins to take place when eldfjöll, the volcanoes, begin to show more signs of life when the layer of ice on top of them grows lighter in weight or disappears altogether depending on whether the volcano is beneath a glacier or not. At the moment the…
Icelandic and Faroese Posted by sequoia on May 15, 2012
Unfortunately we’ve been getting quite a lot of spam comments lately, so if your comment seems to have disappeared it might be because it was caught in the spam filter and we didn’t notice that it wasn’t spam. Sorry! Many people don’t know this (just as many people don’t know about Iceland… some people don’t…
Ordering from a Bookstore Posted by sequoia on May 12, 2012
The other day I ordered some books from this used bookstore, and I remembered how confusing some online shopping terms might be (doing this particular one I learned a new term too). I chose to show you this bookstore because unlike a lot of sites, while this one does openly ship outside of Iceland and…
Pronunciation of vowels. Posted by hulda on May 10, 2012
Or: how to avoid saying “penis” or something equally embarrassing by accident. While it’s ok to have an accent it’s still crucial to learn to pronounce as correctly as possible and the reason for this is that words easily change their meaning in Icelandic. Before we go on I feel like apologizing for the chosen topic…
Compound Words and Genitive Case Posted by sequoia on May 5, 2012
Genitive is one of the most-used cases in Icelandic. Not only is it used to show possession, but it’s also used when making compound words. Compound words are really confusing when you don’t know enough vocabulary to tell where to break the word up in order to look up all the parts in the dictionary…