I think <brú breiða> is accusative, but I could be reading this wrong.

Here's my reasoning
Brú, Brúar: f. bridge
Breiðr: adj, broad
Íss: (gen. íss, pl. ísar) m. ice
Köllum: call, 1st person pl "we call"

My first clue was that the verb is 1st person which -- in my experience with Latin -- implies to me that it will probably be the subject. But I want to make sure. I check in my adjective tables and find that the options available to me for <breiðr> are -- matching gender and number -- nominative (if it's a strong adjective), accusative (if it's a weak adjective). I check <brú> to see what case it probably is and find the options are nominative, accusative, dative (all singular). It can't be dative (doesn't match case), so I'm down to nominative or accusative. I think, though, that <breiðr> is classified as a weak adjective, so I'm left with accusative. Given that, I assume that my broad bridge is not doing any verbing, but being verbed.

So I check on <ís>. I check my tables and find that, yes, it's accusative -- a-plural, drop the second "s", etc. I know, then that -- as you said, too -- <ís> is not doing any verbing, either. I strengthen my hypothesis that the implied "We" becomes the verb-er, while "ice" and "broad bridge" become the verb-ees.

Once in English, though the word order is valid the way you present it below or the way I'm presenting it because "We" is doing the verb either way. Otherwise we would have to translate the phrase as "The broad bridge calls ice".

So, long-winded -- which wasn't my intent, and I hope it's taken in the spirit of sharing in which I mean it -- but that's the reasoning I used to get to my word order.

For what it's worth.

- sabin

On 2/16/2011 11:50 PM, Brian M. Scott wrote:

 

Note, though, that <brú breiða> is nominative, while <ís> is
accusative: '[We] call a broad bridge ice'.