hi!! first of all, amazing blog. secondly, can i ask a grammar related question, i just started learning icelandic and i saw "The following rule applies in Icelandic for all types of words (verbs, nouns etc.): when there is an a in the stem and an ending beginning with u is added, then the a always changes to ö." this rule. Does this apply if the first syllable of the stem has an "a" in it or is it like, the last syllable must have an a in it? Can you give an example, maybe? sorry if this is a stupid question i'm just trying to understant :')
Hi anon! Sorry for the late reply. Thank you for your question!
This thing is called a u-shift. I'll do my best to explain on examples.
Let's take, for example, the word for potato — kartafla. It is a weak feminine noun, which means that its oblique cases (aka all but nominative) should end in -u in the singular, and it's got an -ur plural.
This looks like this:
Singular:
Nom. kartafla
Acc. kartöflu
Dat. kartöflu
Gen. kartöflu
Plural:
Nom. kartöflur
Acc. kartöflur
Dat. kartöflum
Gen. kartaflna
Here you can see that the stem is kartafl-, which stays like this if there's no "u" in the ending (for example in kartaflna), but turns into kartöfl- when there's a "u" in the ending (-u/ur/um).
As you said correctly, it also works in other types of words, for example, in the verb að taka — to take:
að taka - við tökum
However, if there are other vowels between the "a" and the "u", this doesn't happen, for example, in farþegi — passenger. Since it's a masculine word, the -u occurs only in dative, so we'll look at that:
Dat. Plural, without article: farþegum
Dat. Plural, with article: farþegunum
(This is also why the first "a" in kartafla stays unaffected!)
As you can see, the u-shift occurs when there's an "a" in the stem followed by an "u" in the ending. If there's any vowel between "a" and "u", the shift doesn't happen!
I hope that made it a little bit easier to understand!
