# Why is there no distinction between adjectives and adverbs in German



## 涼宮

While this phenomenon isn't unique to German (and Dutch) I find it rather unique for a Germanic language. Is there an etymological reason for this? Did German have a suffix for adverbs in the past? I'm only taking about adverbs derived from adjectives, slow > slow*ly*, quick > quick*ly*, etc. 



English: -ly
Icelandic: -lega
Swedish: -t (the adverb then becomes identical to neuter adjectives)
Danish: -t, -vis
Norwegian: -t

etc.


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## ahvalj

Yes, Old High German had the ending -_o_ (from the Ablative Singular of the o-stems; e. g. mero - Wiktionary or gerno - Wiktionary or rado - Wiktionary), which developed into Middle High German -_e_ and later was abandoned.


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## Riverplatense

In fact, there was an adverbial ending in Middle High German (-_e_: _senft _adj. → _senfte _adv.). Yet I don't know why it was lost. However, there are certain rests both in standard German and in dialect.

(Cross post)


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## Riverplatense

Riverplatense said:


> Yet I don't know why it was lost.



I doubt that it's only a phonological development, but as [e] is most probably the vowel which is most likely to be dropped, this could be one explanation. The same goes for the dative ending (_-e_, too) and a number of other unstressed [e] (or rather: [ə]) in German: _geschmückt _← _geschmücket_ etc.

Of course, one could also claim that the distinction between adj. and adv. is not necessary and that therefore this sound shift might be the reason, but it's also interesting that Romance re-established a new system of adjective-derived adverbs when the synthetic form was lost.


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## berndf

ahvalj said:


> which developed into Middle High German -_e_ and later was abandoned.


Interestingly, there are a few words there the adverbial _-e_ has survived, like _lang_ (adj.) and _lange_ (adv.).


Riverplatense said:


> I doubt that it's only a phonological development, but as [e] is most probably the vowel which is most likely to be dropped, this could be one explanation. The same goes for the dative ending (_-e_, too) and a number of other unstressed [e] (or rather: [ə]) in German: _geschmückt _← _geschmücket_ etc.
> 
> Of course, one could also claim that the distinction between adj. and adv. is not necessary and that therefore this sound shift might be the reason, ...


I would think it is a bit of a chicken and egg problem, similar to the merger of present participle and gerund in English: The loss of the adverbial _-e_ roughly coincides with the loss on declension of predicative adjectives. As a result, the the semantic distinction is blurred. I don't think many modern German speakers would intuitively identify _langsam_ (_slow_ and _slowly_) as belonging to different word classes in _Er geht langsam_ (_He walks slowly_) and _Er ist langsam _(_he is slow_). These semantic and phonetic mergers might have reinforced one another.


Riverplatense said:


> ...but it's also interesting that Romance re-established a new system of adjective-derived adverbs when the synthetic form was lost.


Same in English and German with the adverbial suffix _-lice_. In English it was eventually grammaticalised after the loss of the _-e_ suffix developing into the modern suffix _-ly_ while it did not survive in German.


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## Riverplatense

berndf said:


> Interestingly, there are a few words there the adverbial _-e_ has survived, like _lang_ (adj.) and _lange_ (adv.).



In my dialect there's a number of such forms without correspondence in standard, like _voll _and _volle _(in the meaning of ‹very›).



berndf said:


> Same in English and German with the adverbial suffix _-lice_. In English it was eventually grammaticalised after the loss of the _-e_ suffix developing into the modern suffix _-ly_ while it did not survive in German.



Is it possible that this also got to do with the coincidence of Middle High German -_lich _(adj.) and -_lîche _(adv.) in Modern -_lich_? However, I'm also not sure about English adjectives like _friendly_.


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## berndf

Riverplatense said:


> Is it possible that this also got to do with the coincidence of Middle High German -_lich _(adj.) and -_lîche _(adv.) in Modern -_lich_? However, I'm also not sure about English adjectives like _friendly_.


Yes, friendly and and _freundlich_ follow the same pattern. The difference between the adjective suffix _-lich/-ly_ and the adverbial suffix _-ly_ is that the former is from _-lic_ and the latter from _-lice _(with adverbial _-e_). This difference is lost in the modern_ -ly_ suffix.


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## elroy

berndf said:


> I don't think many modern German speakers would intuitively identify _langsam_ (_slow_ and _slowly_) as belonging to different word classes in _Er geht langsam_ (_He walks slowly_) and _Er ist langsam _(_he is slow_).


 I think this is very likely to be true, because German native speakers who are otherwise very proficient in English will say things like "This sounds idiomatically."  

It should perhaps be noted that many German adverbs have _-erweise _(_normalerweise_, _interessanterweise_, _üblicherweise_) and they are not interchangeable with the base forms.


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## ahvalj

elroy said:


> I think this is very likely to be true, because German native speakers who are otherwise very proficient in English will say things like "This sounds idiomatically."


I'd rather say that "this sounds strangely" (as it is an adverb, not an adjective, that should specify how an action occurs) is the normal expression cross-linguistically, and "this sounds strange" is the aberrant peculiarity of English.


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## elroy

ahvalj said:


> I'd rather say that "this sounds strangely" (as it is an adverb, not an adjective, that should specify how an action occurs) is the normal expression cross-linguistically, and "this sounds strange" is the aberrant peculiarity of English.


 That's not true.  Most languages (to my knowledge) use adjectives:

English: She looks beautiful. / She looks beautifully.*
Arabic: تبدو جميلة / تبدو بجمال*
Spanish: Parece linda. / Parece lindamente.*
French: Elle semble belle. / Elle semble bellement.*

_Beautiful_ doesn't modify the verb but the subject.  The verb in this case takes on a copula-like function.


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## ahvalj

Yes, perhaps my statement would benefit from more reliable statistics. On the other hand we find _it's good_ in English, with the adjective, but _c'est bien/es bien/è bene_ in Romance, with an inherited Latin adverb even after "to be". In "she looks beautiful" Russian will use an adverb (_она выглядит красив__о__/ona vɨglʲadʲit krasʲivo; _but an adjective in "she appears beautiful": _она кажется красивой/ona kažetsʲa krasʲivoj_) while Lithuanian puts an adjective (_ji atrodo graži_). That suggests that the mistake German speakers make here are not necessarily because of their inability to distinguish between adjectives and adverbs but because the brain itself is not very sure which part of the speech to chose in such constructions.


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## elroy

ahvalj said:


> That suggests that the mistake German speakers make here are not necessarily because of their inability to distinguish between adjectives and adverbs but because the brain itself is not very sure which part of the speech to chose in such constructions.


 I'm not so sure.  I've never come across this mistake among other non-native speakers, even those whose native languages do use adverbs.  Besides, Germans do this with the verb _to be_ as well; an example from our own forum: Yes, "Ach, nur so!" would be very idiomatically.

A couple more, with other verbs:
To me it seems naturally.
it sounds more naturally to me, allthough your sentence doesn´t sound really wrong

Do Russians do this?


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## ahvalj

elroy said:


> I'm not so sure.  I've never come across this mistake among other non-native speakers, even those whose native languages do use adverbs.  Besides, Germans do this with the verb _to be_ as well; an example from our own forum: Yes, "Ach, nur so!" would be very idiomatically.
> 
> A couple more, with other verbs:
> To me it seems naturally.
> it sounds more naturally to me, allthough your sentence doesn´t sound really wrong
> 
> Do Russians do this?


The first and third examples can be conveyed in Russian either with (1) the Instrumental Singular of the adjectives or with (2) the form that can be interpreted as the Nominative/Accusative Singular neuter of the adjective or as an adverb (it is etymologically the Nominative/Accusative Singular neuter of the adjective); the second example will be conveyed with (1) after one verb and with (2) after another. Speaking English, Russians will probably randomly choose either the English adjective or the English adverb here.


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## Riverplatense

ahvalj said:


> but _c'est bien/es bien/è bene_ in Romance



Well, in Spanish it would be rather _está bien_, where _estar _does not have this clear-cut copula character _ser _(_es_) has. In Italian it's _va bene_, so the interpretation as an adverb is easier.



elroy said:


> I think this is very likely to be true, because German native speakers who are otherwise very proficient in English will say things like "This sounds idiomatically."



As a native I confirm. I think German speakers lack the natural ability to distinguish adverbs from predicatives, which leads to the use of adverbial forms after every verb but _to be_. I remember when we learnt at school that _to taste_ goes with the adjective and not with the adverb. We learnt it like an exception, only later I understood the reason.



elroy said:


> A couple more, with other verbs:
> To me it seems naturally.
> it sounds more naturally to me, allthough your sentence doesn´t sound really wrong



Here also the ending might have some responsibility. In fact, in German ‹natural› means _natürlich_, and the endings _-ly_ and _-lich_ tend to be identified with each other. So some German natives might even think that it's always _naturally_, according to the scheme:

_freund-lich = friend-ly
natür-lich = *natural-ly_​


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## elroy

Riverplatense said:


> the use of adverbial forms after every verb but _to be_


 Did you see the example with _to be_?  Also, that one used _idiomatically_, which doesn’t have _-lich_ in German.


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## Riverplatense

elroy said:


> Did you see the example with _to be_? Also, that one used _idiomatically_, which doesn’t have _-lich_ in German.



Yes, this was an extreme case and actually extends what I have said above. But still it's strange that this person used the «marked» form instead of the «easier» adjective. But still it just proofs that there is not really an awareness of this difference in German.


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## elroy

Riverplatense said:


> But still it just proofs that there is not really an awareness of this difference in German.


 Ganz meine Rede.


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## berndf

ahvalj said:


> On the other hand we find _it's good_ in English, with the adjective, but _c'est bien/es bien/è bene_ in Romance, with an inherited Latin adverb even after "to be".


I don't know how this is viewed in Italian and Spanish but in French it is clearly peculiarity of _bien/mieux _rather than a general syntactic feature. Most grammarians analyse _c'est bien/mieux _as copula plus predicative adjective rather than as verb+adverb. _Bien_ is often also used as a noun and (rarely) as an attributive adjective (_good people=des gents bien_).


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## gburtonio

berndf said:


> I don't know how this is viewed in Italian and Spanish but in French it is clearly peculiarity of _bien/mieux _rather than a general syntactic feature. Most grammarians analyse _c'est bien/mieux _as copula plus predicative adjective rather than as verb+adverb. _Bien_ is often also used as a noun and (rarely) as an attributive adjective (_good people=des gents bien_).



I became rather obsessed with this for a while, but never resolved it. In Greek you also say 'είμαι καλά' ('I'm well/fine'), where καλά is an adverb (= well), but functions as an adjective after the verb 'be', but only in the context of saying that you are in good health. And of course it's the same in English, too – 'I'm well', and Italian 'sto bene'. It seems a big coincidence that the equivalent of 'well' came to be used adjectivally in so many separate languages in the same context, but I don't know what the connection is, and whether or not it occurs in non IE languages.


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## Riverplatense

gburtonio said:


> [...] and whether or not it occurs in non IE languages.



The same for Basque: _ardo ona da_ ‹the wine is good›, but: _ondo nabil_ ‹I am fine›.


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## berndf

It also occurs in English that adjective-derived adverbs are used without the_ -ly_ suffix. Like with _good/well_ and _bon/bien_ these anomalies mostly occur in order to convey special meaning. I have once heard a non-native compliment his colleagues saying "They have worked hardly". Of course he meant "They have worked hard".


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## Riverplatense

gburtonio said:


> I became rather obsessed with this for a while, but never resolved it. In Greek you also say 'είμαι καλά' ('I'm well/fine'), where καλά is an adverb (= well), but functions as an adjective after the verb 'be', but only in the context of saying that you are in good health. And of course it's the same in English, too – 'I'm well', and Italian 'sto bene'.



But isn't it somehow reasonable? I mean, when saying _I'm well_, _sto bene_ etc. one doesn't actually describe a quality of something, like _I am good = I am a great person_, but rather the way of being. So, actually, it is an adverb, because it's referred rather to the verb than to the subject. Besides, in Italian the adjective _buono _has a specific meaning, so _*sto buono_/*_sono buono_ wouldn't work, anyway. This would also explain why in Italian it's used with _stare _and not with _essere_.


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## gburtonio

Riverplatense said:


> But isn't it somehow reasonable? I mean, when saying _I'm well_, _sto bene_ etc. one doesn't actually describe a quality of something, like _I am good = I am a great person_, but rather the way of being. So, actually, it is an adverb, because it's referred rather to the verb than to the subject. Besides, in Italian the adjective _buono _has a specific meaning, so _*sto buono_/*_sono buono_ wouldn't work, anyway. This would also explain why in Italian it's used with _stare _and not with _essere_.



I understand what you're saying but this kind of retrospective speculation is easy to do but not necessarily accurate. There are a range of adjectives you could use after 'I'm', many of which could be considered as 'the way of being', e.g. tired, exhausted, happy (i.e. as opposed to generally content) etc. but at no point did we switch to using the adverb forms of these. What could predict the use of 'well' in this position but not the use of other adverbs?


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## Dymn

*Spanish*:
_
*soy bien _(ungrammatical)
_soy bueno _- I'm good (i.e. "I behave well" or "I am good at a skill")
_estoy bien _- I'm fine (~ at ease, in a good situation, healthy)
_estoy bueno _- I'm hot (~ sexy)



gburtonio said:


> What could predict the use of 'well' in this position but not the use of other adverbs?


Maybe (I'm just guessing), native speakers don't see such a strong connection between "good" and "well" because of their suppletivity (in English), or obscure link (in Romance languages), than between adverbs regularly derived with _-mente _or _-ly _and their corresponding adjectives.

If the adverbial form of "good" was _buenamente, buonamente, goodly_, perhaps it would be different.

Besides, as I said _estar bien ≠ estar bueno _in Spanish at least, so perhaps it allows some nuances to be introduced. I don't know what difference _estoy triste_ and _*estoy tristemente _could have.


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## bearded

With verbs like 'to sound', Italian is irregular/not consistent: we say _suona bene/male _(it sounds 'well/badly'), but then say _suona strano _(it sounds strange).

Concerning the -ly/lich ending, since I know German better than English, until not very long ago I used to finish letters in English with a ''very friendly yours,'' or ''yours friendly''. It's the opposite of the usual German mistake (adjective instead of adverb: my mistake).


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## ahvalj

I still think this case is one of those when languages allow different parts of speech to convey the same meaning, and the discussions of whether a certain instance is inherently more adjectival or adverbial rather represent justifications of choices the languages have made for the reasons we often don't understand. Let's compare this with the constructions like _chemin de fer_ (French; noun in Genitive) vs. _Eisenbahn_ (German; nominal compound) vs. _железная дорога/želʲeznaja doroga_ (Russian; adjective) vs. _geležinkelis_ (Lithuanian; adjectival compound). Some changes are occurring before our eyes, e. g. while Romance and Germanic languages don't like relational adjectives, in the last centuries they (re)acquired/revitalized expressions like _presidential elections/élections présidentielles._


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## berndf

Apart from verbal adjectives and adverbs (i.e. participles and gerundives) which are sometimes a bit ambivalent, Romance languages distinguish quite scrupulously between predicatives and adverbs. It makes much more sense to regard the predicatives use of _bene/male_ as lexical features of these words rather build a whole new theory about the relationship of these word classes for Romance languages around them.


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## Nino83

bearded said:


> but then say _suona strano _(it sounds strange)


Could it be a case in which an adjective is used as an adverb (_funzione avverbiale_)?


> Un certo numero di avverbî sono propriam. aggettivi che hanno assunto stabilmente funzione avverbiale (per es., lontano, vicino, piano, sicuro, spesso) o che sono usati occasionalmente con tale funzione (andare o lavorare forte; vero, giusto come risposte asseverative, ecc.).


source: Treccani
This phenomenon is more widespread in other Romance languages like Portuguese and Spanish, as this thread shows.
Zapatero: "Creo que lo he dicho claro". Source El Pais.
"O PSD, o nosso partido, sempre que falou claro e forte". Source Público
In Italian one would say "credo di averlo detto chiara*mente*" but one could also say "ha parlato chiaro e forte". So _parlare_ (speak) is more prone to accept adjectives than _dire_ (say, tell). 
Also in Romance languages there is no *rigid separation* between adjectives and adverbs, since in some cases you can also use an adjective, instead of an adverb, in order to modify a verb.


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