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Questions & Answers about Hún borðar hrísgrjón.
What does Hún mean, and why is the subject explicitly included in the sentence?
Hún means she. Unlike some languages that allow the subject to be dropped, Icelandic usually includes an explicit subject pronoun to clearly indicate who is performing the action.
How is the verb borðar formed, and what does its form tell us about the sentence?
borðar is the present tense, third-person singular form of the verb borða (to eat). Its conjugation agrees with the subject Hún (she), indicating that the action is currently being performed by a singular female subject.
What case is the noun hrísgrjón in, and why is that important?
hrísgrjón is in the accusative case because it is the direct object of the verb borðar. In Icelandic, the direct object of a transitive verb takes the accusative, even though the form of the noun may look similar to its nominative form.
Why is there no article (like “a” or “the”) before hrísgrjón?
Icelandic often omits articles with mass nouns or in contexts where the noun is used in an indefinite sense. Here, hrísgrjón functions like a mass noun—similar to how we say “rice” in English—so no article is needed to convey the correct meaning.
Does this sentence follow the standard Icelandic word order, and what is that order?
Yes, it does. Icelandic typically follows a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order in simple declarative sentences. In Hún borðar hrísgrjón., Hún is the subject, borðar is the verb, and hrísgrjón is the direct object, which aligns perfectly with this SVO pattern.