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This article discusses a specific type of genitive compounds in Icelandic and their historical development. This type of compound has genitive plural forms of strong adjectives in the first part, e.g. sjúkra(gen.pl.)rúm, lit. ‘sick (people’s) bed’, i.e. ‘sickbed’, fátækra(gen.pl.)hverfi, lit. ‘poor (people’s) district’, i.e. ‘district populated by poor people, slum’, and blindra(gen.pl.)letur, lit. ‘blind (people’s) script’, i.e. ‘script for blind people, braille’. The type in question is particularly interesting because it has stronger ties to syntactic structures than the more common types with nouns as first parts. Compounds of this type arguably originate in syntax as their word formation almost always reflects a corresponding underlying syntactic structure. Accordingly, the word formation of fátækrahverfi derives from hverfi fátækra ‘district of poor (people)’ with a noun and an attributive genitive; the attribute ends up as the first part in the compound, resulting in a merger of the attribute and the noun.

The study is based on a thorough investigation of digital resources, in particular ONP – Dictionary of Old Norse Prose, which covers texts up to 1540, and RMS – Ritmálssafn Orðabókar Háskólans, a lexicographical archive of excerpted citations from 1540 to modern times. The study reveals an interesting development in these compounds from Old Icelandic to Modern Icelandic. In early Icelandic, we find structures like [[sjúkra manna] [hús]] from [[hús [sjúkra manna]] ‘sick men’s house’, and then a later development shows that the nominal part of the attribute, manna, is omitted and the adjective is left alone in the role of the modifying part, i.e. sjúkrahús, lit. ‘sick (people’s) house’, i.e. ‘hospital’. The omission of the nominal part of the attribute is in the vast majority of cases predictable as it almost always has a reference to human beings.