Breakdown of Hammeren var dyr, men det er en utgift jeg kan leve med.
Questions & Answers about Hammeren var dyr, men det er en utgift jeg kan leve med.
Var is past tense and refers to the hammer’s price in the past context: Hammeren var dyr (the hammer was expensive).
After men, Norwegian often uses present tense to express a general, still-true attitude or evaluation right now: det er en utgift jeg kan leve med (it is an expense I can live with).
English does this too sometimes: The hammer was expensive, but it’s something I can live with.
Hammeren is the definite form: hammer + -en = the hammer (common gender). It implies a specific hammer already known in the context.
En hammer would mean a hammer (not specific).
Dyr means expensive (also animal as a noun, but not here).
As an adjective, dyr agrees like this:
- common gender singular: en dyr hammer
- neuter singular: et dyrt hus
- plural/definite: dyre (e.g., dyre ting, den dyre hammeren)
In your sentence, it’s predicative (after var), and with a common gender subject (hammeren), it stays dyr.
In Norwegian, you normally put a comma before coordinating conjunctions like men when they connect two independent clauses:
- Hammeren var dyr, (clause 1)
- men det er en utgift jeg kan leve med (clause 2)
Det is a dummy/placeholder subject (similar to English it in It is an expense…). It doesn’t necessarily refer to a specific noun; it just fills the subject position so the sentence can be structured naturally:
- det er + noun phrase = it is + noun phrase
Utgift is a common gender noun, so it takes en in the indefinite singular:
- en utgift = an expense
Definite would be utgiften = the expense.
It’s a noun phrase with a relative clause:
- Head noun: en utgift (an expense)
- Relative clause modifying it: jeg kan leve med (that I can live with)
Norwegian often omits the relative pronoun som (that/which) when it’s the object (or part of a prepositional object) in the relative clause. A more explicit version is:
- … en utgift som jeg kan leve med.
In many relative clauses, som can be dropped, especially in everyday style, when it wouldn’t be the subject of the relative clause. Here, the subject inside the relative clause is jeg, so som is not required.
You generally cannot drop the relative marker when it functions as the subject of the relative clause, e.g.:
- en utgift som er stor (an expense that is big)
Here som is doing the job of that/which as the subject of er.
Å leve med is a common Norwegian verb + preposition combination meaning to live with / put up with.
When you make it into a relative clause and omit som, it often “strands” the preposition at the end, just like English:
- English: an expense (that) I can live with
- Norwegian: en utgift (som) jeg kan leve med
Not necessarily. Kan literally means can (ability), but in this context it often expresses tolerance/acceptance: I can live with it = it’s acceptable to me.
So jeg kan leve med is idiomatic: I can put up with it / I’m okay with it.
Norwegian main clause word order is typically Subject–Verb–(rest): jeg kan leve med.
Inside this relative clause, the word order stays like a normal clause because it’s not an inversion context (nothing is moved to the front to trigger verb-second inversion). So modal kan comes right after jeg, and the infinitive leve follows it.
Yes, and it’s very natural. It shifts the structure:
- Original: … men det er en utgift jeg kan leve med (frames it as an expense)
- Alternative: … men jeg kan leve med det (more direct: but I can live with it)
Both are correct; the original sounds a bit more formal/precise by naming it as en utgift.