Plurals

You may have noticed that, so far, we have only really worked with singular nouns and pronouns. This was a deliberate choice to help us focus on their patterns and gain a feel for how they change. Now that we are ready, it's time to introduce plural weak nouns.

Weak Plural Table

Learning plural weak forms might seem like doubling the work we've already done, but if you have kept up with the lessons, a good bit of the groundwork is already well in place.

Here is the chart:

	Masc.	Fem.	Neut.
Nom.	-ar	-ur	-
Acc.	-a	-ur	-
Dat.	-um	-um	-um
Gen.	-a	-a	-na

It's important to remember that written langauge is a way to represent spoken sounds. Similar to how in English you can often tell that something is agrammatical because it "sounds wrong," the same skill can be developed for other langauges, too. The key is developing a sense for how things are supposed to sound. The rest of the lesson will help you do that.

Nominative

Hopefully you noticed a patterns that you have seen before! The plurals in the nominative end in a vowel and r for the masculine and the feminine, but not the neuter. This may seem familiar if you remember the way in which þeir changed depending on the gender it was representing. If it was a masculine group, it ended with -eir, if it was feminine, -ær, and neuter, -u.
Example 1: Þeir eru asnar. - (They are donkeys.)
Example 2: Þær eru pöndur. - (They are pandas.)
Example 3: Þau eru hjörtu.- (They are hearts.)

Practice: Read the examples above numerous times outloud. Then, change the nouns to other weak nouns we have learned (E.g, "jakki", "banki", "mamma", "lunga"). As you so, try not to look at the table. Instead, close your eyes and just remember what gender the noun fell into.

Accusative

Moving to the accusative, the next thing to notice is that only the masculine has a different form for the accusative. As such, you only need to mentally differniate nominative and accusative plural contexts for masucline nouns.

Example 1: Ég elska ansa. - (I love donkeys.)
Example 2: Ég elska pöndur. - (I love donkeys.)
Example 3: Ég elska hjörtu - (I love hearts.)

Practice: Read the examples above numerous times outloud. Then, change the nouns to other weak nouns we have learend. (E.g, "jakki", "banki", "mamma", "lunga"). As you so, try not to look at the table. Instead, close your eyes and just remember what gender the noun fell into. In addition, now that you have gotten familiar with the nominatives, you are going to mix in sentences of both types.

Dative

Moving to the dative, the gernders all end the same!

Example 1: Ég kasta böltum. - (I throw balls.)
Example 2: Ég hlálpa pöndum. - (I help pandas.)

Note: It is extremely, extremely rare that you are going to use any neuter weak plural noun in the dative case, and I had a hard time finding even a single noun to make one example that would make any kind of remote sense at all, so I did not include one.

Practice: Read the examples above numerous times outloud. Then, change the nouns to other weak nouns we have learend. (E.g, "jakki", "banki", "mamma"). The sentences will not make sense, but it is drilling down the sounds that is most important here.

As we have previously larned, the most common scenario for a dative noun is as an indirect object, and indirect objects are almost always followed by a direct object.

Example 3: Ég baka ösnum köku. - (I bake donkeys a cake.)
Example 4: Ég baka pöndum köku. - (I bake pandas cake.)

Practice: Read the examples above numerous times outloud. Then, change the nouns to other weak nouns we have learend. (E.g, "jakki", "banki" "mamma"). The sentences will not make sense, but it is drilling down the sounds that is most important here.

Genitive

At this point, we are still going to skip the genitive case and come back to it in a later lesson. As you can see from the chart, the pattern is fairly simple. It ends in an a unless its neuter, in wich case an n comes first.

All Together

While the forms themselves aren’t too difficult to understand and the thought process we've covered is relatively simple, the real challenge comes with speed and balancing all these small thinking processes at once.

Of course, this will becomes easier with time, and practice is key.

For practice, translate the following into Icelandic:

1. Pandas eat cakes.
2. Mom threw balls.
3. Donkeys love to eat bananas.
4. She bakes donkeys cakes.