Starfsmaðurinn svarar kurteislega að hún sé komin, en að afhendingin taki nokkrar mínútur.

They are subjunctive forms.

In Icelandic, when you report what someone says, answers, claims, believes, etc., the reported clause is often put in the subjunctive, especially in more careful or written language. Here the sentence is reporting the employee’s reply, not directly stating the facts from the narrator’s own point of view.

So:

• að hún sé komin = that she has arrived / that she is here
• að afhendingin taki nokkrar mínútur = that the delivery will take a few minutes

If you used er and tekur, the meaning would still be understandable, but it would sound more like the speaker is simply presenting those things as plain facts rather than reporting them at a slight distance.

Sé is the present subjunctive of vera = to be.

In this sentence, it is the 3rd person singular form, matching hún.

So:

• hún er = she is
• hún sé = that she be / that she is, in reported speech or other subjunctive contexts

A learner will often first meet sé in indirect speech like this.

Komin is the past participle of koma used with vera.

The combination vera kominn / komin / komið is very common in Icelandic and means something like:

• have arrived
• be here now after arriving

So hún sé komin means that she has arrived / is here.

The participle agrees with the subject:

• hann sé kominn
• hún sé komin
• það sé komið

That is why you get komin here: it matches a feminine singular subject, hún.

No. Hún can refer to a woman, but in Icelandic it can also refer to any noun with feminine grammatical gender.

That is an important difference from English. English usually uses it for things, but Icelandic often uses hann, hún, or það depending on the noun’s grammatical gender.

So if the thing being referred to is a feminine noun, Icelandic uses hún even if English would say it.

Because there are two separate subordinate clauses, both depending on svarar:

• að hún sé komin
• að afhendingin taki nokkrar mínútur

The word en connects them, but each clause still has its own að.

In English, you might say that ... but that ..., or you might drop the second that. Icelandic often keeps the second að, especially when the structure is longer or when the writer wants the sentence to stay clear.

Those endings are the suffixed definite article in Icelandic.

So:

• starfsmaður = employee
• starfsmaðurinn = the employee

and:

• afhending = delivery, handover
• afhendingin = the delivery

Unlike English, Icelandic usually attaches the to the end of the noun instead of writing it as a separate word.

Because mínútur is a feminine plural noun, and nokkrar has to agree with it.

So:

• mínúta = a minute
• mínútur = minutes
• nokkrar mínútur = a few minutes

Also, with taka meaning take in a time expression, Icelandic uses the accusative for the duration:

• taka eina mínútu
• taka tvær mínútur
• taka nokkrar mínútur

So nokkrar mínútur is exactly the form you would expect after taki here.

Afhendingin is the subject of the clause:

• að afhendingin taki nokkrar mínútur

Literally, this is that the delivery takes a few minutes.

So the structure is:

• afhendingin = subject
• taki = verb
• nokkrar mínútur = object / time duration

This is very close to English structure, except that Icelandic uses the subjunctive taki here.

This is normal Icelandic main-clause word order.

The sentence begins with the subject:

• Starfsmaðurinn

Then comes the finite verb in the usual second position:

• svarar

Then the adverb:

• kurteislega

So:

• Starfsmaðurinn svarar kurteislega ...

That is a very natural order in Icelandic. English also allows answers politely, so this part is not too different, but in Icelandic the finite verb’s early position is especially important.

Yes. That is one of the useful things to notice about vera kominn/komin/komið.

It often expresses both:

• the completed action of arriving
• the resulting state of being here

So depending on context, hún sé komin may sound like:

• she has arrived
• she is here now
• if it refers to a thing, it has arrived / it is here

That is why this construction is very common in Icelandic.