Breakdown of Við höfum farið yfir þessa brú mörgum sinnum.
Questions & Answers about Við höfum farið yfir þessa brú mörgum sinnum.
Icelandic commonly uses the present perfect construction (hafa + past participle) to describe actions that have occurred in the past with relevance to the present or emphasise completion.
- Við höfum farið yfir = “We have gone over/We’ve crossed.”
You can also use simple past Við fórum yfir (“We went across”), but the perfect often sounds more natural when talking about repeated past experiences up to now.
Fara yfir literally combines fara (“to go”) with the preposition yfir (“over, across”) to mean “to cross.”
- The preposition yfir indicates movement across something and requires the object to be in the accusative case (see next questions).
When you use fara yfir to express crossing, yfir is treated like a directional preposition taking the accusative.
- Nominative (subject): þessi brú
- Accusative (object of movement): þessa brú
Thus fara yfir þessa brú = “to cross this bridge.”
Many Icelandic time expressions use the dative. After a numeral or adjective + sinn (“time, occasion”), you put sinn in the dative plural:
- Nominative plural: mörg sinn
- Dative plural: mörgum sinnum
Hence mörgum sinnum = “many times.”
Yes. Icelandic has relatively flexible adverbial placement, as long as you respect the Verb-Second (V2) rule: the finite verb (höfum) must be in second position. Both of these are grammatically correct:
- Við höfum farið yfir þessa brú mörgum sinnum.
- Við höfum mörgum sinnum farið yfir þessa brú.
The nuance is tiny—1 emphasizes the action first, 2 highlights “many times.”
- Við höfum farið yfir (present perfect) suggests the action happened at various unspecified times in the past and has present relevance (“We’ve crossed… up to now”).
- Við fórum yfir (simple past) treats it as a completed event at a definite time (“We crossed the bridge [once or a few times]”).
For repeated or habitual past actions, the perfect is often more idiomatic.
In Icelandic, you usually choose either a demonstrative pronoun (þessi brú = “this bridge”) or the definite article suffix (brúin = “the bridge”).
- Þessi brú is “this bridge.”
- Brúin is “the bridge.”
You do not need both; using þessi brúin is grammatically possible but redundant.
- Ö is an open-mid front rounded vowel, similar to the vowel in British English “burn” or French “eu.”
- In Icelandic, f between vowels often voices to [v]. So höfum sounds roughly like [ˈhœːvum].
Icelandic follows the V2 word-order rule: in main clauses, the finite verb must occupy the second position regardless of what comes first (subject, object, or adverbial). Here:
- Við (1st position)
- höfum (finite verb, 2nd)
3+. farið yfir þessa brú mörgum sinnum (rest of the clause)