Re: adjectives -> adverbs

At 6:13 pm +0100 20/3/99, Orjan Johansen wrote:
>On Sat, 20 Mar 1999, Daniel Andreasson wrote:
>
>> Lately I've been curious as to how adverbs are formed out of
>> adjectives.
>>
>> I know that in Swedish you use the neuter form of adjectives, in
>> English you use -ly, and in German you don't do anything at all.
....and in colloquial English we more often than not don't do anything at
all :)

>> But
>> there has to be more and cooler ways.
>
>Well, I recall that Latin uses the suffixes "-e" and "-er" (depending on
>declination),
Yep - "-e" was fairly consistent for those adj. that formed their fems.
with 1st decl. endings & the masc. & neuters with 2nd.  "-er" is not
uncommon for 3rd decl/ adjectives, but another common practice was to have
the acc. or abl. of the neuter serve as an adverb or - and this seems to
have been a growing tendency in the colloquial language - to use some adj.
+ noun periphrasis, e.g. 'tacito modo' "in a silent manner", i.e.
"silently"; 'mala mente' "with evil intent", i.e. "evilly" etc. hence....

>while modern Romance languages tend to use some form of
>"-ment(e)".
Yep - added to the feminine form of the adjective.

>But I suppose that is not really any more exotic.
No more than the use of -wise to form adverbs in certain odd styles of
colloquial English  :)

>For that,
>I think you need to look at more than just what inflection to use.
>
>What about doing something similar to the systems for noun/adjective,
>so that you have some kind of correspondence with the verb, with different
>classes of verbs creating adverbs with different endings, or inflecting
>the adverb for tense or things like that...
Welsh forms them with the prefix 'yn' (+ soft mutation), e.g. 'da' "good",
'yn dda' "well".  But it also uses the 'yn' forms as predicative
adjectives.  So I guess it's no different from German in using the same
form for both purposes.

Which raises the question: Do you need to distinguish between adjectives
and adverbs [of manner] at all?

Ray.