Introduction to Inflection
What is Inflection?
As a native English speaker, the most important thing to understand about Icelandic is that it does not grammatically function like English; Icelandic is a heavily inflected language, while English is not.
Inflection in English
Inflection refers to the process whereby a word changes its form to fit a certain grammatical context or indicate an additional aspect, such as tense or person. While these words may not mean much to you right now, by the end of this course, you will be a master of them both!
Note: Grammatical inflection is a different kind of inflection than the one that is meant by modulating the pitch of one’s voice.
English words do not inflect very much. Because of the lack of inflection, when you learn a new noun (a word that represents a person, place, thing, or idea), such as horse, you can use it fairly freely in nearly any sentence and context you want, and it will make sense grammatically.
Although you may not recognize it now, the three sentences below use the noun horse in three different grammatical contexts. By the end of this course, you will understand these contexts fully, but for now, it is not incredibly important.
Example 1: This is a horse.
Example 2: I saw a horse.
Example 3: I gave a horse an apple.
The only real inflection that English nouns undergo is to follow extremely regular and consistent rules. In English, you add an -s or -es to the end of a noun to change it from singular to plural (one to many) and add the words a/an or the before the noun to make it indefinite or definite (roughly, non-specific or specific). Notice below how these simple additions change what images and ideas come to mind.
Example 1: A horse eats.
Example 2: The horse eats.
Example 3: Horses eat.
Example 4: The horses eat.
It is largely the same story with English verbs (words that represent actions): there are only a few simple and fairly regular rules to follow. For example, you add an -s to the end of the word when the subject (the one doing the action) is he, she, or it, and add an -ed to change the verb from the present tense (when the verb is happening) into the past tense.
Example 1: I bake bread.
Example 2: He bakes bread.
Example 3: I baked bread.
Example 4: He baked bread.
While there are some exceptions and a few more rules to learn, English inflection is fairly simple. This is not the case in Icelandic.
Inflection in Icelandic
While there are typically only four possible forms for each noun in English (a horse, horses, the horse, the horses), there are up to sixteen different forms for each noun in Icelandic. For Icelandic verbs, too, instead of just a few forms, there can be over a hundred possibilities depending on the verb in question! Moreover, not all the forms look nearly as similar to each other as separate English forms do! This is what it means when people say that Icelandic is heavily inflected; there are many different forms for each word!
Sadly, the abundance of forms does not necessarily mean that there are many more equally valid ways to say something in Icelandic. Instead, it means that you must be more careful to pick the appropriate word form that fits the needs of the sentence. Since using the correct inflection largely depends on grammatical context, you need to have a better sense of grammar to speak Icelandic than you typically do for English. This course will help you achieve that!
While mastering Icelandic inflection can seem daunting, with time and practice, it will become as natural and effortless as it is in English. In the next two lessons, you will learn the very basic ideas of verb inflection (conjugation) and noun inflection (declension) in Icelandic.