Breakdown of Igår var lådan tom. Vi hade ingenting, absolut inget värdeföremål.
vara
to be
vi
we
ha
to have
igår
yesterday
lådan
the box
inget
nothing / no (neuter)
tom
empty
absolut
absolutely
ingenting
nothing
värdeföremålet
the valuable object
Questions & Answers about Igår var lådan tom. Vi hade ingenting, absolut inget värdeföremål.
Why does the sentence use both ingenting and inget? Could I swap them?
No, they serve different roles here. ingenting is exclusively a standalone pronoun meaning "nothing". inget acts as a determiner here, meaning it must attach to a noun to mean "no [noun]". You can see this because inget is placed directly in front of the noun värdeföremål.
If inget is a dual-purpose form, could I have said Vi hade inget instead of Vi hade ingenting in the first half?
Yes! Because inget is dual-purpose, it can act as a standalone pronoun meaning "nothing", just like ingenting. However, ingenting is often preferred when you want to strongly stress the idea of "nothing" as a standalone concept, which fits nicely with the emphatic tone of this sentence.
Could I use ingenting in the second half, like absolut ingenting värdeföremål?
No, that would be incorrect. Because ingenting is exclusively nominal (it acts as a noun on its own), it cannot be used as an adjective or determiner to modify another noun. You must use inget (or ingen for en-words) when placing it directly before a noun.
Why is it var lådan instead of lådan var in the first sentence?
This is the V2 (verb-second) rule in action. Because the sentence starts with the time expression Igår (Yesterday), the verb var must take the second position, pushing the subject lådan to the third position.
How can I tell the gender of the compound word värdeföremål from this sentence?
You can tell it is an ett-word because it is preceded by inget, which is the neuter form of the word for "no". In Swedish compound words, the very last word determines the gender, so the whole word takes the gender of ett föremål (an object).
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