Breakdown of Fartyget med den höga mastens kanon är trasig.
vara
to be
hög
high / loudly
den
the (with en-words)
trasig
broken
med
with
fartyget
the ship
kanonen
the cannon
masten
the mast
Questions & Answers about Fartyget med den höga mastens kanon är trasig.
Why is the 's' attached to mastens instead of fartyget?
This sentence uses the phrasal genitive (gruppgenitiv). When a noun is modified by a prepositional phrase, like med den höga masten (with the high mast), the genitive -s attaches to the very last word of the entire phrase. Even though the cannon belongs to the ship as a whole, the -s goes on the mast.
Why is the word for cannon just kanon and not the definite kanonen?
In Swedish, whenever a noun is possessed by a genitive expression (anything ending in a possessive -s), it must be in the indefinite form. Even though we mean 'the cannon', the genitive phrase acts as the definite marker, so we just use kanon.
Fartyget is an ett-word, so why does the sentence end with trasig instead of trasigt?
The adjective trasig describes what is broken. Here, it is the cannon (en kanon) that is broken, not the ship (ett fartyg). Because kanon is an en-word, the adjective takes the standard en-word form trasig.
Inside the phrase, why do we need den in den höga mastens?
This is a classic example of Swedish double definiteness. Because you are combining an adjective (höga) with a definite noun (masten), you must include the standalone definite article (den). The fact that an -s gets tacked on at the end does not change this underlying rule.
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