Adjectives

When we talk about people, objects and every other thing in the universe, we need nouns to name them. But when we want to specify the characteristics of those items, we use adjectives. An example would be “a clown”. You are perhaps now picturing your idea of a typical clown. But if I tell you, that “the clown is angry”, or “the clown’s nose is blue” the adjectives “angry” and “blue” add information about the clown, and that changes the image in your head. The use of adjectives in Danish is made difficult by the fact that their endings change depending on different characteristics of the entity (person, object etc.) that they describe. Those characteristics are: number (singular vs. plural), grammatical gender (n-gender vs. t-gender) and definiteness (definite or indefinite). Let’s have a look at these grammatical categories in turn and how they are expressed in adjectives (see also my explanation of nouns).

Gender

Using the term gender for noun classes in Danish is a bit of a misnomer, since grammatical gender is not tied to biological gender (anymore), but rather is assigned randomly (it seems) to all nouns in the Danish language. This means that you have to either know the gender of a noun or you’d have to look it up in the dictionary before you can know the correct form of the adjective. The examples in (1) illustrate the use of adjectives with nouns of different genders. Note, that gender is only relevant with singular nouns – see more on plural farther below.

1)

a. N-gender                                                         

en stor lejlighed          a large appartment     

en ung kvinde             a young woman          

en hvid cykel               a white bicycle            

b. T-gender

et stor-t hus                 a large house

et ung-t individ            a young individual

et hvid-t køretøj           a white vehicle

As shown, N-gender does not add an ending to the adjective, while T-gender adds a -t ending.

Number

The category of number is basically about whether there is one or more of the entity referred to by the noun. Compare the plural examples in (2) to those above in (1).

2)         

to stor-e lejligheder     two large apartments   

to stor-e huse              two large houses

to ung-e kvinder          two young women

to ung-e individer        two young individuals

to hvid-e cykler           two white bicycles

to hvid-e køretøjer      two white vehicles

As shown, adjectives are marked as plural by an -e ending, and the gender of the noun is no longer relevant. (Most of the nouns are marked for plural by an -(e)r ending, only one by the -e ending, but this is not tied in any way to gender, see more on this in my treatment of nouns.)

Definiteness

Definiteness refers to whether the entity can be identified by us while communicating. There can be a number of reasons why we might, or might not, be able to identify the item(s) that we’re talking about, or we may not care. For instance in the sentence, “hand me two large oranges”, “two large oranges” is indefinite, because we don’t know specifically, and perhaps don’t care, which two oranges we’ll be handed, as long as they’re large. While in “hand me the two large oranges” we know which ones we’re asking for – perhaps because there are only two oranges in the fruit bowl, or perhaps there are only two large ones and then a number of smaller ones. The point is, that adding “the” indicates that both the speaker and the listener can unequivocally identify the objects of the conversion.

            Contrast the examples of definite adjectives in both singular and plural with the indefinite ones in (1) and (2).

3)         den stor-e lejlighed     the large appartment 

            de stor-e lejligheder    the large apparments

            det stor-e hus              the large house

            de stor-e huse             the large houses

            den ung-e kvinde        the young woman

            de ung-e kvinder         the young women

            det ung-e individ         the young individual

            de ung-e individer       the young individuals

            den hvid-e cykel          the white bicycle

            de hvid-e cykler          the white bicycles

            det hvid-e køretøj        the white vehicle

            de hvid-e køretøjer     the white vehicles

As shown, adjectives are marked as definite by an -e ending, regardless of their number and gender. This makes definiteness the most confusing grammatical category related to adjectives (and nouns), because it is easy to confuse the definite -E with the plural -E. That they are not the same is proven by the example pairs in (3) where both singular and plural nouns use the same -e ending on the adjective.

            Note also, that the definite ending of nouns like kvinde-n and hus-et can not be combined with adjectives. Instead we must use the definite pronouns den/det/de as was shown in (3).

As is the case with all of the major grammatical categories, there exist a number of irregular adjectives. These are shown in (4) (partly inspired by Anders Basby’s description of adjectives in Danish (see also here for a version in Danish) ).

(4)

1. Adjectives that end in a syllable with a short vowel get an extra consonant before an -e ending:
   • en grøn skov / den grøn-n-e skov                  (green forest)
   • et flot maleri / det flot-t-e maleri                      (pretty, painting)
   • en langsom sang / den langsom-m-e sang    (slow, song)
   • en generel regel / den generel-l-e regel         (general, rule)
2. Adjectives that end in an e do not take any endings:
   • en bange kat, et bange barn / to bange katte (afraid, cat, child)
   • en direkte rute, et direkte angreb / to direkte ruter    (direct, route, attack)
   • en moderne kjole, et moderne liv, to moderne kjoler (modern, dress, life)
3. Adjectives that already end in a t do not take a -t ending.
   • en sort bil,  et sort hus, to sort-e biler                         (black, car, house)
   • en træt hest, et træt får, to træt-t-e heste                  (tired, horse, sheep)
   • en tæt ven, et tæt venskab, to tæt-t-e venner            (close, friend, friendship)
4. Adjectives that end in -en, -el, -er drop a syllable before -e endings:
   • en muggen ost, to mugn-e oste                                 (moldy, cheese)
   • en gammel kvinde, to gaml-e kvinder                        (old, woman)
   • en lækker kage, to lækr-e kager                                (delicious, cake)
5. Adjectives ending in -sk do not take a -t ending.
   • en svensk sofa, et svensk hus                       (Swedish, sofa, house)
   • en typisk mandag, et typisk vejr                     (typical, Monday, weather)
   • en teknisk fejl, et teknisk problem                  (technical, error, problem)
6. Adjectives which are originally derived from verbs only have two endings -t and -de which correspond to the perfect and past tense forms of the donor verb:
   • at smadre ‘to break
     • et smadre-t vindue                  ‘a broken window’
     • to smadre-de vinduer             ‘two broken windows’
   • at inspirere                              ‘to inspire’
     • et inspirere-t menneske          ‘an inspired person’
     • to inspirere-de mennesker     ‘two inspired people’
   • at dele                                     ‘to divide’
     • et del-t hus                              ‘a divided house
     • to del-te huse                          ‘two divided houses’
   • at aflyse                                  ‘to cancel’
     • en aflyst kamp                        ‘a canceled match’
     • to aflys-te kampe                    ‘two canceled matches’