The pronoun

OE pronouns fell roughly under the same main classes modern pronouns: personal, demonstrative, interrogative and indefinite. As for the other groups — relative, possessive and reflexive — they were as yet not fully developed and were not always distinctly separated from the four main classes. The grammatical categories of the pro nouns were either similar to those of nouns (in "noun-pronouns") or corresponded to those of adjectives (in "adjective pronouns"). Some features of pronouns were peculiar to them alone.

The adjective

As stated before, the adjective in OE could change for num­ber, gender and case. Those were dependent grammatical categories or forms of agreement of the adjective with the noun it modified or with the subject of the sentence — if the adjective was a predicative. Like nouns, adjectives had three genders and two numbers. The category of case in adjectives differed from that of nouns: in addition to the four cases of nouns they had one more case, Instr. It was used when the ad­jective served as an attribute to a noun in the Dat. case expressing an instrumental meaning — e.g.: lytle werede 'with (the help of) a small troop'. As in other OG languages, most adjectives in OE could be declined in two ways: according to the weak and to the strong declen­sion. The formal differences between the declensions, as well as their origin, were similar to those of the noun declensions. The strong and weak declensions arose due to the use of several stem-forming suffixes In PG: vocalic a-, 6-, u- and i- and consonantal n The difference between the strong and the weak declension of adjectives was not only formal but also semantic. Unlike a noun, an adjective did not belong to a certain type of declension. Most adjec­tives could be declined in both ways. The choice of the declension was determined by a number of factors: the syntactical function of the adjective, the degree of comparison and the presence of noun determiners, The adjective had a strong form when used predicatively and when used attributively without any determiners, e, g.:

pa menn sindon sode 'the men are good'

mid hnescre beddinse 'with soft bedding'

The weak form was employed when the adjective was preceded by a demonstrative pronoun or the Gen. case of personal pronouns, e.g.: fwet weste land 'that uninhabited land ру betstan leope 'with the best song'. Like adjectives in other languages, most OE adjectives distinguished between three degrees of comparison: positive, comparative superlative. The regular means used to form the comparative and superlative from the positive were the suffixes -ra and-est/ost. Sometimes suffixation was accompanied by an interchange of the root-vowel The root-vowel interchanges in long, eald, 3/cEd go back to different sources. The variation [a~ae] is a purely phonetic phenomenon; retrac­tion of [ae] before the back vowel in the suffix -ost is not peculiar to the adjective. The interchange in long and eald is of an entirely different nature: the narrowed or fronted root-vowel is regularly employed as a marker of the comparative and the superlative degrees, together with the suffixes. The mutation of the root-vowel was caused by i-umlaut in Early OE. At that stage the suffixes were either -ira, ist or -ora, -ost. In the forms with -i- the root vowel was fronted and/or made narrower; later -i- was lost or weak­ened to –e but the mutated root-vowel survived as an additional for­mal marker of the comparative and superlative degrees.

The adjective зоd had suppletive forms. Suppletion was a very old way of building the degrees of comparison (it can be illustrat­ed by the forms of adjectives in other IE languages: G gut, besser, beste, Fr mal, pire, R хороший, лучше).