Old French is a Romance language, and hence inherited a lot of its grammatical structure fromLate andVulgar Latin.
Old French adjectives have three genders, two numbers and two cases. Regular Old French adjectives follow a similar declension pattern to modern French ones.
Adjectives are used to qualify nouns or pronouns, to give more information about them. They agree in gender, number and case with the noun or pronoun they qualify. They are mainly used in two ways, with acopula (that is,estre, to be) and without one:
estoit is the verb formestre.
No form of the verbestre
Word order is not as fixed as it is in modern French so adjectives
In this example, in contrast to the one above, the adjectivedreite precedes instead of following the nounveie. The noun in the example above isamis.
Similarly, adjectives can come before as well as after the verbestre
The adjectiveclers precedesfut, thepreterite ofestre (more commonly spelledfust).
Adjectives have three qualities; gender (masculine, feminine and neuter), number (singular and plural) and case (oblique and nominative), hence twelve different forms. Dictionaries list theobliquemasculinesingular, this is in line with the way nouns are listed (seeAppendix:Old French nouns). The declension of adjectives mimics that of nouns.
The following table shows the original Latin and the Old French descendant forms. The neuter is not listed as it is always invariable.
| Language | Nominative masculine singular | Accusative masculine singular | Nominative masculine plural | Accusative masculine plural | Nominative feminine singular | Accusative feminine singular | Nominative feminine plural | Accusative feminine plural |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Latin | bonus | bonum | bonī | bonōs | bona | bonam | bonae | bonās |
| Old French | bons | bon | bon | bons | bone | bone | bones | bones |
The final-s is inherited from Latin-us,-ōs and-ās. The final-a and-am ofbona andbonam become-e. Thus the regular declension pattern for Old French adjectives is -s, unchanged, unchanged, -s, -e, -e, -es, -es.
Comparatives and superlatives are form as they are in modern French usingplus(“more”) andle plus(“the most”).
As in modern French, a couple of adjectives have single-word comparatives and superlatives
Parv is an extremely rare derivative of Latinparvus(“small”), of which the comparative isminor, the etymon ofmenor. Hence,menor may be considered a stand alone comparative/superlative only adjective, rather than as the comparative and superlative ofparv.
Other adjectives that me be considered as separate adjectives in Old French includegrandisme, from Latingrandissimus, the superlative ofgrandis. Despite their roots, they are functionally separate. See Frenchgrandissime for more information.
Moving towards Middle French, the case system collapsed leaving just inflection due to gender and number. As with nouns, the oblique case was retained so that masculine singulars had no-s and masculine plurals had an additional-s. The feminine had identical oblique and nominative forms anyway so the feminine singular continued to have no-s while the plural took one. This system continues in modern French to this day.
