Word
Hundarnir hlaupa á ströndunum hjá skipunum.
Meaning
The dogs run on the beaches by the ships.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
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
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?