Heill Haukur!

You have no idea how useful it is to practice even such a
trivial little thing as writing heill with two l's when
I address one male person. Practicing little things like that
makes me conscious of things my eye tends to skip over when I
merely read text.

> "En þú hefir rétt fyrir þér," (1)

Phrases like these are very difficult to find, except in very
complete dictionaries. When looking in Orgland\Raastad, I
find another, similar expression for the same thing:

"To be right" (å ha rett) = hafa á réttu að stanða. (2)

But phrases like these, (1) & (2), are difficult to understand.
(1): But you have right for yourself. ?
(2): to have to stand to rights ??
It is also difficult to see whether rétt/réttu is adjective,
adverb or noun. (?)

The dictionary treats 'með réttu' under réttr adj., and
says it means "rightly", and adds 'cf. rétt adv.'.
The form réttu could be either a form of the adj. réttr
or the noun réttr. But neither reading makes a lot of sense to me.
The funny thing is that also Norwegian has the phrase "med rette",
with the same meaning, and we use it all the time. "Det sier du
med rette", i.e. 'That you say with justice", "That you say
rightly". The Norw. "rette" is a form of the noun "rett" that
is used in certain phrases such as "gå i rette med en",
"finne seg til rette med noe" etc. And it must derive from
the old meaning of "rett" as court of justice. That helps a little
but does not completely explain the phrase (2) to me.
For if it is the noun, it is an u-stem and has the declension
of vo,llr (field), and hence réttu is a plural. What does the
plural signify in this connection?

> I don't know if that is idiomatic Old Icelandic;
> I think they would have said something like:
>
> "Rétt er það mælt!" - That is correctly spoken.
>
> or
>
> "Rétt mælir þú!" - You speak correctly.

Old Norse preferred brevity. Haukur's solution therefore
has an immediate appeal.

>
> [Knífr í bak, Óskarr:]

Even little phrases like this are extremely useful.
Because here I learned to see why it is "í bak"
and not "í baki". And that was a distinction that wasn't
as clear to me before I was given the chance to think through
this example.

Best regards
Keth