Komdu blessuð/blessaður!
As you may know, we Icelanders use different forms of greetings for men and women.
In the above instance, the literal meaning is “come blessed”, as in “come into this space, or interaction, in a blessed way”. It is also sometimes shortened to just “blessuð” (this is for the female) and “blessaður” for the male.
Incidentally, it is the gender of the person spoken to that determines the difference, not the gender of the speaker, as it is in some languages.
On parting, we often use a similar greeting, namely “vertu blessaður/blessuð”, meaning “be blessed”, as in “be blessed wherever you go from here”.
It’s quite lovely, isn’t it?
Also, it’s one of those things that we Icelanders are so accustomed to saying that we rarely think of the true meaning, unless we have reason to dissect it (like me, now).
Incidentally, these days we also have non-gendered greetings (for non-binary folks). In this case we would use “blessuð” which in addition to being the greeting for a single female, is also the greeting you would use to address a group of folks in the plural. This of course is in line with the “they/them” pronoun for non-binary peeps.
Today’s section from The Little Book of Icelandic is, in fact, about noun genders and how they work in the Icelandic language.
(For more on greetings you may want to check out this post, although by now it is for paid subs only, as it’s part of the archives.)
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