Tips for learning Weak Adjectives

Adjectives are declined weak or strong depending on how they are used in a sentence. When the adjective follows a demonstrative or a possessive (like 'the wicked witch' or 'my wicked witch'), the adjective is weak; when it stands alone (like 'the witch is wicked' or 'wicked witches'), the adjective is strong.

Weak Adjective tila
tila	Masculine	Neuter	Feminine	Plural
Nominative	tila	tile	tile	tilan
Accusative	tilan	tile	tilan	tilan
Genitive	tilan	tilan	tilan	tilra
Dative	tilan	tilan	tilan	tilum

• the table above is very similar to the tables for the weak nouns of the three genders - the only difference is in plural genitive tilra instead of the less commonly found tilena, the form that would be expected from comparison with the noun tables.

Strong Adjective til
til	Masculine	Neuter	Feminine
Nominative	til	til	tilu
Accusative	tilne	til	tile
Genitive	tiles	tiles	tilre
Dative	tilum	tilum	tilre

Plural
Nominative	tile	tilu	tile
Accusative	tile	tilu	tile
Genitive	tilra	tilra	tilra
Dative	tilum	tilum	tilum

• the endings for strong adjectives should be familiar: they are taken from the pronoun and strong noun paradigms.

• note: possessive adjectives (ie: genitive pronouns acting as adjectives) such as min and þin are always declined strong.

§ 5. The Old English Pronoun.

Pronouns were the only part of speech in Old English which preserved the dual number in declension, but only this makes them more archaic than the rest parts of speech. Most of pronouns are declined in numnber, case and gender, in plural the majority have only one form for all genders.

We will touch each group of Old English pronouns and comment on them.

1. Personal pronouns

OE personal pronouns had three persons, three numbers in the 1st and 2nd person, (two numbers in the 3^rd person) and three genders in the 3rd person. The pronouns of the 1st and 2nd person had suppletive forms like their parallels in other IE languages. The pronouns of the 3rd person, having originated from demonstrative pronouns, had many similarities with the latter. In OE, while nouns consistently distinguished be­tween four cases, personal pronouns began to lose some of their case distinc­tions: the forms of the Dat. case of the pronouns of the 1st and 2nd person were fre­quently used instead of the Acc., in fact the fusion of these two cases in the Pl. was completed in some dialects already in Early OE: Acc. eowic and usic were replaced by Dat. eow, us;

  ( þ / ð) e.g. þú = ðú

1st person
	Singular	Plural	Dual
N	ic, íc	wé	wit
G	mín	úre	uncer
D	mé	ús	unc
A	mec, mé	úsic, ús	uncit, unc
2nd person
N	þú	gé	git
G	þín	éower	incer
D	þé	éow	inc
A	þéc, þé	éowic, éow	incit, inc
3rd person
N	hé (masc.), héo (fem.), hit (neut.)	híe (masc., neut.), héo (fem.)
G	his, hire, his	hiera, heora
D	him, hire, him	him
A	hine, híe, hit	híe, héo

 

It may seem they look much like Modern English ones. Through the last 1500 years mín became mine, gé turned into you (ye as a colloquial variant). But changes are still significant: the 2nd person singular pronouns disappeared from the language, remaining only in poetic speech and in some dialects in the north of England. This is really a strange feature one can hardly recall any other Indo-European language which lacks the special pronoun for the 2nd person singular (French tu, German du, Russian ты etc.). The polite form replaced the colloquial one, maybe due to the English traditional "ladies and gentlemen" customs. Another extreme exists in Irish Gaelic, which has no polite form of personal pronoun, and you turn to your close friend the same way as you spoke with a prime minister - the familiar word, translated into French as tu. It can sound normal for English, but really funny for Slavic, Baltic, German people who make a thorough distinction between speaking to a friend and to a stranger.

The word for "she" was héo in Old English. The word she probably comes from the feminine demonstrative pronoun séo (see below), which derives from the Common Germanic sjó. But the exact origin of this simple word is unknown, and there is even a version that it came from Celtic languages (Irish sí [shee]) or from Scandinavian.