Adjectives – Definite form

Velkommen til en ny presentasjon om adjektivet. Denne uken skal vi snakke om bestemt form av adjektivet. Welcome to a new presentation about norwegian adjectives. This week are going to talk about the definite form of the adjective. Enjoy.

In week 1, we learnt the Indefinite Form of the adjective like in: Ei fin jente – fine jenter En fin bil – fine biler Et fint hus – fine hus The Indefinite Form of the adjective is used to describe indefinite nouns. For instance, in English you can say A nice girl, a nice car, a nice house Nice girls, nice cars and nice houses We learnt that adjective inflection in Norwegian must follow gender and number of the noun the adjective describes And we attached a comprehensive guide to adjective inflection in both week 1 and 4. Now, this week we are going to learn The Definite Form of the adjective which is used to describe definite nouns.

In English you simply use the article «the» in order to make this construction

To exemplify, consider the difference between: A nice girl VS the nice girl ( a very specific one ) You just change the article from indefinite «a» to definite «the» and you are good to go In Norwegian, the inflection of the definite form of the adjective is quite special, we call it in fact

Double definite construction because the definite form is marked twice: First by the definite articles DEN, DET or DE

Then by the definite form of the noun (f.ex: bilen). den fine jenta den fine bilen det fine huset de + fine + jentene/bilene/husene

First: As you see in this slide, adjectives in definite form are always attributive, that means they are always placed in front of the noun they describe.

Second: You have also probably noticed that the definite form of the adjective takes the same ending in -e as in plural. To avoid confusion we then have to mark gender and number of the noun clearly, and that’s why we ended up with a double definite construction!. We mark the gender and number of the noun with the articles DEN, DET and DE and then we add the noun in definite form so that no doubts arise about what we are talking about. Got it? Learning this pattern now implies of course that you previously have learnt how to inflect nouns and adjectives.

So if you are in doubt, review the grammar from course 1 for the nouns and from week 1 on this course for the adjectives. Lykke til!