The History of the English Language - Tapa blanda

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1903 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XXIII. Adverbs And Other Particles. The Adverb. 463. The classes of adverbs requiring special attention in a history of English are those formed from nouns, adjectives, and pronouns by derivative endings, since these alone have suffered considerable changes. Of these derivative adverbs, those formed from adjectives are by far the most numerous. Adverbs derived from adjectives had most commonly in Old English the suffix-e. Examples are hearde, wide heard, wid 'hard, wide.' If the adjective itself ended in the adverb was unchanged in form, as OE. cfiene cltine 'clean.' All adverbs of this sort by the loss of final e came to have in early Modern English the same form as the adjective. Some of these have remained to the present day in standard English, as hard, fast, first, and many more are found in dialectal English and in the older language of poetry. For historically, it is inaccurate to say that the poet uses the adjective for the adverb, since in reality he is but continuing the use of an older adverbial form. In standard English most of these older adverbs have taken the more distinctive adverbial ending-ly. A few Old English adverbs, some of them without corresponding adjectives, ended in-a, as sdna 'soon.' This final a became-e in Middle English and was later dropped. 464. We now form adverbs regularly by adding-ly to the adjective, and this adverbial derivative has come down to us from the earliest times. The suffix in Old English, however, was not-ly but-lice allied to like. This gave in Southern English of the middle period the form-liche so common in Chaucer. But from this-liche or-lice, it does not seem easy to derive our-ly, so that Ten Brink has proposed to regard it as from the Norse cognate ending-ligr, which was...