The adjective, the numeral, and the adverb

In Old English the adjective had rather a complicated system of grammatical forms, which comprised 3 genders, 2 numbers and 5 cases. These forms served to express the agreement of adjectives with the nouns they modified.

Moreover, as in other old Germanic languages (and in Modern German), every adjective had two different types of declension: strong and weak. The choice of declension depended on whether the noun modified by the adjective referred to something thought of as definite or as indefinite.

1. The strong declension was "indefinite": the adjective assumed it when used with a noun taken in a general sense, e. g. He is god man "He is a good man'. This declension is traditionally called "strong" because its inflection was more varied and consequently better suited for differentiating grammatical meanings than that of the weak declension. It is also called pronominal, for, although its historical basis was the nominal a- and 6-stem declension, it included some pronominal endings. These endings are underlined in the following table.

2. The weak declension was "definite": the adjective was weak when used with a noun referring to a thing or a group of things singled out as definite, in which case the noun was usually determined by a demonstrative or possessive pronoun, e. g. sg goda man. The inflection of the weak declension was nominal: it coincided with that of the weak noun declension, except for the genitive plural, where the "strong" (pronominal) ending -ra replaced the "weak" (nominal) ending -ena:

Several classes of words used attributively were declined like adjectives in Old English. Apart from a number of pronouns, they were participles and ordinal numerals. The latter made the : noun they were used with definite, and therefore followed the weak type of adjectival declension, except oper 'second', which was declined like a strong adjective. So was the cardinal numeral an 'one' and the indefinite article which was developing from it.

Unlike the declension of the English adjective, its forms of comparison have proved very stable. With some modifications they have survived from the most ancient to modern times.

In Old English the comparative degree of adjectives was formed by means of the suffix -r(a) (from an earlier *-ora in some adjectives, from *-ira in others). The superlative degree, had the suffix -ost or-est (<*-ist).

E. g. wīd 'wide' — wīdra — wīdost

In Old English those adjectives which originally took the suffixes *-ira, *-ist show i-mutation of the root vowel in the comparative and the superlative degree,e. g.:

ald 'old' — eldra — eldest

lång 'long' — lengra — lengest.

The verb

In Old English the grammatical system of the verb consisted entirely of synthetical (simple) forms.

The finite forms, used as predicates, comprised 3 moods: the indicative, the subjunctive or conjunctive, and the imperative, with 2 tenses, the present and the past (also called preterite), distinguished in the indicative and the subjunctive, 2 numbers, the singular and the plural, in all the moods, and 3 persons in the singular indicative.

The non-finite, or nominal, forms were the infinitive and the participle: participle I (traditionally called “the present participle”) and participle II (“the past participle”).