SubscribeSuperficially, the development of adverbs is not very striking during the period [1170-1370], and yet it is during [this period] that essential aspects of modern adverbial formation take shape. Certain important features were inherited from O[ld] E[nglish]. In the first place, all adverbs save a few notable exceptions were derived [i.e., were not basic words without endings]; in the second, many of the derivations were by specialisation of inflectional forms belonging to other form-classes. Most commonly, adverbs were specialised uses of an old adjective case-ending in -e that we can best call dative-instrumental (it is concerned with means and thence with manner). A very common type of adjective with which this method was used was that which itself was formed with the semi-suffix -lic ('shape, form, body') added to a nominal stem, as in the series freond - freondlic - freondlice ('friend, friendly, friendlily'). Indeed, such forms were so familiar that -lice came to be isolated as a formative and thought of as 'the' way of making adverbs. It is added even redundantly, and to forms where -lic would not fit; for instance, we have eornoste, adj and adv ('earnest(ly)'), but a new adverbial form eornostlice is created to keep the Ø [i.e., no ending]: -lice correlation. Although the formations in -e and -lice are in origin identical, by 1170 they were felt as distinct, -e, though familiar in many common words, having become inactive [i.e., not added to new forms], while -lice was highly productive. This was the situation in the S[outh] and Mid[lands]. The N, having already lost -e, will have types in Ø and -lik, which in weak (i.e., normal) use, will become -li (cf. ik, i [meaning 'I']). This is clearly the pattern we have inherited in P[resent-day] E[nglish]. In run fast, go slow, adverbs of unchanged type survive; in prettily, happily,> It survives in the -like words in English today.
noisily, the -li type survives. It is likely that the O[ld] N[orse] suffix -lig, which also became -li, gave support, but native tradition is sufficient to account for it. By the end of our period the S was reaching the same stage in respect of loss of -e, but its reflex of -lice was -lich, which cannot be the source of the modern forms. The sense of unease about adverbs homophonous with an adjective, which led to the development of the eornostlice type, has been felt at all periods, and there has been a steady progress from plain to -ly forms; even the very tenacious close-knit phrases I quoted as evidence of plain adverbs are now felt by some speakers to require re-formation in -ly.
1. Adverbs ending in "ly" -- Ly, Anglo-Saxon lic, was once an independent word, the Anglo-Saxon lic=like. Words of this termination were, in Anglo-Saxon, compound adjectives. So, in Old English, we have the adjective earthliche, earthly; ferliche, strange. In modern English there are words such as godly, lonely, lovely. Godly is equivalent to God-like. According to the present habit of the English language, an adjective is converted into an adverb by annexing ly; as bright, brightly.Perhaps pertinent to some of the side-questions, if only to note that when writing that in 1867, he called the +ly a "present habit".
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posted by oinopaponton at 9:05 AM on November 13, 2009