Page:The American Language.djvu/242

226 §5 The Adverb—All the adverbial endings in English, save -ly, have gradually fallen into decay; it is the only one that is ever used to form new adverbs. At earlier stages of the language various other endings were used, and some of them survive in a few old words, though they are no longer employed in making new words. The Anglo-Saxon endings were -e and -lice. The latter was, at first, merely an -e-ending to adjectives in -lie, but after a time it attained to independence and was attached to adjectives not ending in -lie. In early Middle English this -lice changes to -like, and later on to -li and -ly. Meanwhile, the -e-ending, following the -e-endings of the nouns, adjectives and verbs, ceased to be pronounced, and so it gradually fell away. Thus a good many adverbs came to be indistinguishable from their ancestral adjectives, for example, hard in to pull hard, loud in to speak loud, and deep in to bury deep (= Anglo-Saxon, deop-e). Worse, not a few adverbs actually became adjectives, for example, wide, which was originally the Anglo-Saxon ad- jective wid (=wide) with the adverbial -e-ending, and late, which was originally the Anglo-Saxon adjective laet (=slow) with the same ending.

The result of this movement toward identity in form was a confusion between the two classes of words, and from the time of Chaucer down to the eighteenth century one finds innumer- able instances of the use of the simple adjective as an adverb. "He will answer trewe" is in Sir Thomas More; "and soft unto himself he sayd" in Chaucer; "the singers sang loud" in the Revised Version of the Bible (Nehemiah xii, 42), and "indiffer- ent well" in Shakespeare. Even after the purists of the eight- eenth century began their corrective work this confusion con- tinued. Thus, one finds, "the people are miserable poor" in Hume, ' ' how unworthy you treated mankind ' ' in The Spectator, and "wonderful silly" in Joseph Butler. To this day the gram- marians battle with the barbarism, still without complete suc- cess; every new volume of rules and regulations for those who would speak by the book is full of warnings against it. Among