[PLUG-TALK] begging the question

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Mon Oct 5 01:49:45 UTC 2009


On Sun, 4 Oct 2009 17:55:23 -0700
Tony Rick <tonyr42 at gmail.com> dijo:

> ... to say nothing of 'anyways'  (or have we already been over that gound?) ...

The adverbial -s is of great antiquity in English, harking back to 459
CE when the Angles, Saxons, and maybe some Jutes first started
migrating to England. It seems that the -s ending was a genitive marker
for adjectives, and served dual purpose to derive an adverb from an
adjective. (This was long, long before -lice 'like' became the current
adverbial -ly suffix.)

Although mostly relics, genitive adverb forms still exist in present
day English. These include a lot of compounds with -way, e.g.,
'sideways.' Although 'anyway' was not part of the -ways forms, by
analogy people started adding the -s. Analogy in language is a very
powerful force.



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