Old English Adjectives

Most historians agree that the number of adjectives in Old English not very significant. There are primary adjectives, dating back fromold times and derivative adjectives made by adjective-forming suffixes H nouns. The adjectives of those times are similar to our Slavic adjectives, that is, this part of speech agrees with the noun it modifies in number, gender and case. Consequently, the adjectives have the same categories as the nouns do. Besides, they have categories which are purely adjectival.

The adjective in Old English had the following categories: number - the singular and the plural; gender - masculine, neuter and feminine; case 4/5 (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and partly instrumental).

Besides, the adjectives had two declensions, strong and weak (we may compare them to 2 forms in Ukrainian зелений гай /зелен клен, though in Ukrainian the second is found only in the nominative case, or Russian красная лента/красна девица, where the indirect cases of the latter combination will be красны девицы, красну девицу, etc.). The weak form of the adjective is used after a demonstrative pronoun, a personal pronoun or a noun in the genitive case, no matter whether the adjective is before the noun or after it and may be a stable epithet to the noun. When the adjective is not so accompanied, or is preceded by an adjective of quantity or number, it is declined strong.

Specifically adjectival categories are the degrees of comparison - the positive, the comparative and the superlative. These are characteristic only for the qualitative adjectives.

All in all, each adjective might theoretically have up to sixty forms. In reality there are much fewer forms, because not all the adjectives had degrees of comparison, and case and gender endings in many cases might coincide (compare in Ukrainian: великий будинок, велика_кімната, велике вікно- великі_будинки/ кімнати/вікна; вели кого будинку/вікна).

The paradigm of adjectives was rich in forms. The same endings were found in declension of participles that were declined in Old English and agreed with the nouns they modified (for comparison we may take Ukrainian case endings that are almost the same for the adjectives and for the participles).

Qualitative adjectives had degrees of comparison (positive, comparative and superlative). The forms of the comparative and the superlative degree are made synthetically, by adding suffixes -ra and -ostZ-est. soft - softra - softost (soft) blaze - blsecra - blacost (black) The number of syllables in the adjective did not affect the rule - even polysyllabic adjectives may take these suffixes.