Breakdown of Glæpamaðurinn stendur milli gamla dómarans og lögfræðingsins.
og
and
gamall
old
standa
to stand
milli
between
dómarinn
the judge
lögfræðingurinn
the lawyer
glæpamaðurinn
the criminal
Questions & Answers about Glæpamaðurinn stendur milli gamla dómarans og lögfræðingsins.
Why are the judge and the lawyer in the genitive case here?
The preposition milli (between) always forces the nouns that follow it to be in the genitive case.
Why is the adjective for old written as gamla instead of gamli?
Because it describes a specific, definite noun (the old judge), it uses the weak declension. For masculine adjectives in the weak declension, the ending is -a for all three oblique cases (accusative, dative, and genitive). Since the preposition forces the genitive case here, we use gamla.
How do we get the form dómarans for the judge?
The base word is the weak masculine noun dómari. In the genitive case, it becomes dómara. To say the judge, we add the definite article suffix. Because dómara ends in a vowel, we just add -ns rather than the full -ins, giving us dómarans.
Why does the word for the lawyer get the suffix -ins (lögfræðingsins) while the judge just gets -ns (dómarans)?
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