Old Norse for Beginners – Lesson Ten

1.1 Dative Case: with Adjectives

In English, the dative case is sometimes used in conjunction with adjectives:
“He’s good to her.””Be nice to me.””That is good news to me.”
The exact same thing is common in Old Norse:”Hann er hánum góðr.””Ver mér góðr.”
“Fiskr er norskum mönnum góðr matr.”1.2 Possessive Pronouns
Possessive pronouns in English are “my”, “your”, “his”, etc:
“My horse.”
“Their horses.”
“Our horses.”
In Old Norse, these must decline with the noun. Since their function is equivalent to that of an adjective, they decline like (strong) adjectives. The singular possessives all decline in the same way; we will take as their archetype “minn” (my), in masculine:
sg pl
nom min-n mín-ir
acc min-n mín-a
dat mín-um mín-um
gen mín-s min-na
It declines, in fact, just like the article. To explain the declension a bit:

* The -n ending in the nom sg is because of assimilation (of the traditional -r)
* The -n ending in the acc sg is because of contraction (of -an)
* The -na in the gen pl is again assimilation (of -ra)
* The long stem vowel shortens in front of the double ‘nn’

Compare this to the declension of strong adjectives, masculine and neuter; and to the article declension; you should be seeing a pattern by now.

“Þinn” (from “þú”, = your) and “sinn” (from “sik”, = his own, her own, its own) both decline exactly like “minn”.

Then there are the plural possessives; we start with “okkarr”, masculine of the possessive of “vit”:

sg pl
nom okk-ar-r okk-r-ir
acc okk-r-an okk-r-a
dat okk-r-um okk-r-um
gen okk-ar-s okk-ar-ra

Not much new in this pattern; the -ar ending gets contracted to -r if the following ending starts with a vowel (as in okk-ar-um > okk-r-um), though not in acc sg.
And the same pattern in “várr”, masculine possessive of “vér”: masculine sg pl
nom vár-r vár-iracc vár-n vár-adat vár-um vár-umgen vár-s vár-ra
The 2p dual, “ykkarr” declines like “okkarr” above. The 2p plural also declines like “okkarr”, but with a ‘v’, “yðvarr” (as the genitive form), which falls out along with the ‘a’ of the -ar ending:

masculine sg pl
nom yð-v-ar-r yð-r-ir
acc yð-v-ar-n yð-r-a
dat yð-r-um yð-r-um
gen yð-v-ar-s yð-v-ar-ra

Obviously, the possessive pronouns introduce a wealth of new forms; but a thorough student should have mastered all the endings involved by now, and if he/she has, there are only the irregularities to be learned, which makes mastery of these pronouns considerably easier than one would think.
The 3rd person possessives do not decline; they are merely the genitive forms of the respective personal pronouns, i.e “hans” (masc sg), “þess” (neut sg), “hennar” (fem sg, not introduced), and “þeirra” (pl for all genders).
The possessives generally postcede the word that they compliment, though they may precede them, usually for emphasis.
The article may not be attached to any word complemented by a possessive pronoun:
“Hestr minn”, not *”Hestrinn minn”
(The article is attached in some of the modern languages, such as Modern Icelandic; any occurrence of that is thus, most likely, “modernicism”)
Regarding the usage of these pronouns, it is bad style in ON to repeat them “unnecessarily”, as one would do in English. So while English would say:
“He goes with his men and his slaves.”ON would only say:
“Hann ferr með mönnum sínum ok þrælum.”

1.3 Locative Adverbs

Adverbs indicating place, ‘where’, often have similar forms indicating ‘whence/where from’, and ‘whither/where to’. The forms of some of the most common adverbs are:
hvar where
hvaðan whence/where from
hvert whither/where to
þar there
þaðan thence/there from
þangat thither/to there
hér herehéðan hence/here from
hingat hither/to here
heima at home
heiman from home
heim homewards/back home