An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

Participle
____
g
.
edo¯n
g
.
ega¯n
All the other forms can be simply deduced. In the past tense you should
take a verb form such as de¯mde as the base.
Of the above forms, the past tense form of ga¯n, namely e¯ode, is probably
VERB FORMS
49
02 pages 001-166 29/1/03 16:09 Page 49

---

the one that stands out as being odd, as quite unrelated to present-day
English and at the same time unlike any of the other Old English forms.
This is the result of suppletion. In suppletion what happens is that some
forms in the paradigm are taken from one lexical word (in this case ga¯n)
and other forms are taken from an entirely different lexical word (here
e¯ode). Interestingly for the history of English, the past tense suppletive
forms were replaced in Middle English by an alternative suppletion,
based on the past tense of wend, so that went took over from e¯ode. That in
turn caused wend to form a new past tense of its own, the regular form
wended.
4.8 More on i-mutation and suppletion and adjectives
Now that we have spent a little time on the topics of i-mutation and
suppletion, the opportunity has arrived to bring these two topics
together by looking once more at adjectives. When we discussed adjec-
tives in Chapter 3, the one major issue I completely ignored was the
method used in Old English to produce comparative and superlative
forms.
For the most part there are no serious difficulties here when the forms
are compared with those in present-day English. Note, especially,
that comparison by the use of more, most with the positive adjective
is virtually non-existent in Old English, and all forms are derived by
inflection. Note also that all comparatives are declined only according to
the definite declension; this is because comparative forms are inherently
definite. Superlatives have some indefinite inflections but not through-
out the paradigm.
For the majority of adjectives, therefore, the process of comparison
is achieved by the addition of standard comparative and superlative
suffixes. The comparative suffix is -ra, the superlative suffix is -ost. Thus
the compared forms of the definite adjective blinda ‘blind’ are blindra,
blindost. The most common variation here occurs with a small group of
adjectives which have a final -u in the positive, for example calu ‘bald’,
g
.
earu ‘ready’, mearu ‘tender’, nearu ‘narrow’, which have forms of the type
nearora, nearwost, which reflects the fact that historically they originate
from an otherwise lost declension.
But there are some important adjectives which do not follow the above
patterns. There can be two quite separate reasons for this. The first, and
larger, group consists of adjectives which had compared forms deriving
from a different form of the two inflections, namely a shape in which
the inflections originally started with an i. This i appears as an e in the
superlative but disappears altogether from the comparative. But, more
50
AN INTRODUCTION TO OLD ENGLISH
02 pages 001-166 29/1/03 16:09 Page 50

---

importantly, before it disappears it causes i-mutation in the compared
forms of the relevant adjective. A typical example of this is eald ‘old’ with
compared forms yldra, yldest. Other similar adjectives are: feorr ‘far’, gre¯at
‘great’, and sc