8.4. Comparison of adjectives

The comparative adjective is made by adding -r- between the root syllable and the inflectional ending, which is always weak regardless of context. The superlative is made by adding -ost, which may be followed by either a weak or a strong inflection. Examples:

heard ‘hard, fierce’	heardra	heardost
milde ‘kind’	mildra	mildost
hāliġ ‘holy’	hāliġra	hālgost
sweotol ‘clear’	sweotolra	sweotolost

Some adjectives have i-mutation in the comparative and superlative forms, and in these cases the superlative element is usually -est. For example:

eald ‘old’	ieldra	ieldest
ġeong ‘young’	ġinġra	ġinġest
hēah ‘high’	hīera	hīehst
lang ‘long’	lenġra	lenġest
strang ‘strong’	strenġra	strenġest

You may occasionally encounter unmutated forms, e.g. strangost ‘strongest’.

17.

Grammatical categories of the Verbals

In OE there were two non-finite forms of the verb: the Infinitive and the Participle. The Infinitive had no verbal grammatical categories. Being a verbal noun by origin, it had a sort of reduced case-system: two forms which roughly corresponded to the Nom. and the Dat. cases of nouns –

beran – uninflected Infinitive (“Nom.” case)

tō berenne or tō beranne – inflected Infinitive (“Dat.” case)

Like the Dat. case of nouns the inflected Infinitive with the preposition tō could be used to indicate the direction or purpose of an action. The uninflected Infinitive was used in verb phrases with modal verbs or other verbs of incomplete predication.

The Participle was a kind of verbal adjective which was characterized not only by nominal but also by certain verbal features. Participle I (Present Participle) was opposed to Participle II (Past Participle) through voice and tense distinctions: it was active and expressed present or simultaneous processes and qualities, while Participle II expressed states and qualities resulting from past action and was contrasted to Participle I as passive to active, if the verb was transitive. Participle II of intransitive verbs had an active meaning; it indicated a past action and was opposed to Participle I only through tense. Participles were employed predicatively and attributively like adjectives and shared their grammatical categories: they were declined as weak and strong and agreed with nouns in number, gender and case.

18. The majority of OE verbs fell into two great divisions: the strong verbs and the weak verbs.

Strong Verbs

The strong verbs in OE are usually divided into seven classes. Classes from 1 to 6 use vowel gradation which goes back to the IE ablaut-series modified in different phonetic conditions in accordance with PG and Early OE sound changes. Class 7 includes reduplicating verbs, which originally built their past forms by means of repeating the root-morpheme; this doubled root gave rise to a specific kind of root-vowel interchange.

The principal forms of all the strong verbs have the same endings irrespective of class: -an for the Infinitive, no ending in the Past sg stem, -on in the form of Past pl, -en for Participle II.