From: daniel prohaska
Message: 36389
Date: 2005-02-18
Piotr,
Thanks for the below. I have a question I’ve been pondering about for a while and I’ve heard and read conflicting opinions about, concerning the adjective and adverb suffixes /-li:c/ and /-li:ce/ in OE. I’d say the <c> was palatalised in the OE period and it regularly gives ME <-lich(e)> or <-lych(e)>. Yet ModE has <-ly>. Since OE /c/ regularly becomes /tS/ in ModE why is the final affricative dropped? The only other example where I can see a vaguely similar development is OE <ic> “I” in the Midlands .
Or was the /-li:ce/ suffix replaced by Norse <-ligr> / <-liga>? What would you say?
Dan
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On 05-02-17 23:02, Brian M. Scott wrote:
>>>She speaks loud (or do you say loudly? Sprachgefühl says
>>>to me: loud)
>
>
> I say <loudly> and find <loud> questionable, but in fact
> <loud> has been an adverb as well as an adjective for a long
> time, and the comparative and superlative survive even for
> those of us who no longer use <loud> as an adverb.
>
>
>>>She jumped higher than him.
>>>She ran slower than him. (Slowlier, huh?)
>
>
> <High> and <slow> are adverbs as well as adjectives, so
> there's no problem here. (Actually, many prefer <slowly> to
> adverbial <slow>, but the old comparative and superlative
> are standard.)
Just to put it in a historical perspective: in Old English, adverbs
derived from adjectives were, etymologically, just oblique case forms
(dative/locative in most instances), and usually differed from the
quotation forms of adjectives only in having a final -e (e.g. lang 'long
[adj.]' vs. lange [adv.]). This -e was lost by the 15th century, which
resulted in complete homophony between adjectives and inherites adverbs.
This is what we still have in such words as <high, low, fast, hard,
only, early, late, far, near, long, wide> etc., not to mention <bloody
[ UK ], damned, fucking> and the like.
In the course of Middle English the suffix -ly(che) became specialised
as an adverb marker. Originally, however, OE -li:c formed adjectives
(with corresponding adverbs in -li:c-e, e.g. fre:ond-li:c 'friendly
[adj.]', fre:ond-li:ce 'in a friendly manner'). Note that even in Modern
English <only, early> may belong to either category and <friendly,
kingly, dastardly, manly> etc. are normally adjectives, not adverbs.
<lowly> is an adverb when it means 'in a low degree, insufficiently',
but only an adjective when it means 'low in rank/social class'.
For some items, doublets have developed, usually with differentiated
meanings. <slow>, <quick> and <loud>, if used as adverbs (opinions
differ as to how "correct" these are in standard English), mean roughly
the same as <slowly>, <quickly> and <loudly>; but <hardly, shortly,
lately, widely, highly> and some other such words have specialised
meanings different from those of the endingless adverbs.
In non-standard varieties of English endingless adverbs are extremely
common (<love me tender, love me true>). You can also find <scarce,
uncommon, wondrous> etc. as archaisms consciously employed as such in
older poetry.
Piotr
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