Breakdown of Hundarnir hlaupa á ströndunum hjá skipunum.
hundurinn
the dog
á
onto / on / in (static location) / on (a day of the week)
hlaupa
to run
hjá
next to / at (someone's) place, with
ströndin
the beach
skipið
the ship
Questions & Answers about Hundarnir hlaupa á ströndunum hjá skipunum.
Why do both ströndunum and skipunum end in -unum?
The ending -unum means "the" for plural nouns in the dative case. The prepositions á (on) and hjá (by) both force the nouns that follow them into the dative case. Since we are talking about "the" beaches and "the" ships, they get the definite dative plural ending.
Strönd is feminine and skip is neuter. Do all genders share the same -unum ending here?
Yes! One of the nice things about the dative plural in Icelandic is that gender doesn't matter. Whether a noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter, it will almost always end in -um (bare) or -unum (definite) in the dative plural.
I thought the preposition á sometimes forces the accusative case. Why is it dative here?
á takes the dative case when it describes a fixed location or where an action is happening. Because the dogs are running around on the beaches (location), we use the dative. If they were running onto the beaches from somewhere else (motion towards), á would take the accusative.
Why does hundarnir (the dogs) end in -nir instead of -unum?
Hundarnir is the subject of the sentence (the ones doing the running), so it stays in the nominative (default) case. The -nir ending is the masculine plural definite ("the") ending for the nominative case. The dative -unum ending is only for the nouns affected by the prepositions.
Learn Hundarnir hlaupa á ströndunum hjá skipunum and more in Icelandic
All course content and exercises are completely free — no paywalls, no trial periods, no signup needed.
- ✓ Practice with interactive exercises
- ✓ Track your progress with spaced repetition
- ✓Learn at your own pace — completely free