Third declension adjectives > adverbs in "-ē"?

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Bitmap

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Compare mihi multi libri sunt and in cubiculo meo multi libri sunt
That doesn't convince me so much because the dative denotes possession here and the prepositional phrase denotes location ... and adverbials don't really express possession.

or auxilio venerunt and ut auxiliarentur venerunt.
That's more convincing, you may have a point here.
It's also come to my mind that poetry uses datives to express direction sometimes, like urbi venire (instead of in urbem) or caelo palmas tendere (instead of ad caelum) ... I suppose they can be explained as dativi commodi, but they touch very closely on adverbials.
 

Glabrigausapes

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Michael Zwingli dixit:
I am left wondering why facile and dulce would appear in the face of faciliter and dulciter...
So I don't think anyone has approached this from the angle of 'phonesthetics'. In the case of the former, it seems perfectly reasonable that a Roman would not want to say this un-Latin sequence of short vowels, obstruents, and liquids. In fact, in light of the word facultas, I'm rather surprised that faculter isn't the regular word.

Dulciter is a bit less... well let's just say: non liquet. But who knows? All it takes is one or two bad associations to utterly damn a word. The modern English 'moist' is currently enjoying(?) this mystique, although it's a bunch of hooey in my opinion. Granted, I myself refuse to utter the word 'squelch', but the reasons why are not fit for the present company of fair ladies and squeamish gentlemen.
 

Pacifica

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I believe dulciter is the usual adverb and dulce is mostly poetic.

Such is not the case of facile, of course, which is the regular adverb.
 

Issacus Divus

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Well -iter was a very Latin to do. Facile was probably an ablative that just gave way to faciliter, a bit like equus to caballus.
 

Pacifica

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Facile was probably an ablative
I think it's more likely to be accusative. The ablative would usually be facili, though it's true that an -e variant ending in third-declension adjectives exists. What makes you think it's ablative?
 

Serenus

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I think it's more likely to be accusative. The ablative would usually be facili, though it's true that an -e variant ending in third-declension adjectives exists. What makes you think it's ablative?
The ablative singular -e of e.g. cīvitāte, meliōre. The idea here is that facile may have been an Old Latin adjective with ablative -e that was fossilized into an adverb before -e became associated with non-i-stem nouns and adjectives. It's not on 100% certain ground that facile is historically a neuter accusative.
 

Michael Zwingli

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Thank you. I must say, you all represent a tremendous resource. I'm quite glad that you have all seemed to weather the COVID-19 storm thus far without obvious harm. The give and take here seems very revealing of the extant uncertainties of IE linguistic history.
Like Bitmap and Pacifica I wonder whether those datives should be considered adverbials. They seem much closer to some kind of indirect object to me semantically, just slightly more indirect, especially to the extent that ethical datives and datives of reference/separation express a benefit or loss/harm (datives of purpose and possession tend to be more benefit/loss-neutral and more clearly adverbial, I think, like in Pacifica's examples indeed). I guess it depends on how you define "adverbials" beyond the basic place/manner/time/reason/concessive/conditional (and final clause) uses.
Yes, I see your point. For my part, I was merely referencing what I found here: https://sites.google.com/site/knightsfabulae/chapter-35-hippolytus/adverbial-uses-of-the-dative-and-accusative-cases Of course, this may just represent those writers' own interpretation in the face of linguistic uncertainty...
I think Serenus hit upon the difficulty of this to an English speaker:
English is also generally allergic to this strategy, with infrequent exceptions like the adverb "fast", which I guess partly explains your surprise.
This type of "borrowing" would seem to be naturally rarer within such non-inflected languages as modern English.
None of that seems really strange. All of the examples discussed here are pretty simple examples of grammaticalisation as far as I can see.
On reflection, what you say is true. I guess I'm trying to understand why this was done in Latin, which I have always viewed as a rule-based, rule-governed language, as opposed to English, wherein rules are made to be broken.

A seemingly obvious question: is there a term in linguistics for such "borrowing" within inflected languages, of parts of speech in a particular case for use as different parts of speech, as is represented by adjective (neuter accusative) > adverb (iūge), or adjective (feminine accusative) > adverb (perperam)?
 

Serenus

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On reflection, what you say is true. I guess I'm trying to understand why this was done in Latin, which I have always viewed as a rule-based, rule-governed language, as opposed to English, wherein rules are made to be broken.
The sooner you stop believing in that myth the better. There's actually a fair bit of chaos in Latin too. Incidentally, you may amuse yourself reading about what is actually attested in case endings. There's always been some ambiguity/variation on what the difference between the ablative singular endings -ī and -e is exactly, even if you restrict yourself to the classical era, and quite a number of weird exceptions (ignis 'fire' is commonly either ignī or igne but otherwise has genitive plural ignium and the optional i-stem accusative ignīs, see also the adjective vetus 'old' and its noun-y declension with vetere vetera veterum, and -āns active participles are a mess).

A seemingly obvious question: is there a term in linguistics for such "borrowing" within inflected languages, of parts of speech in a particular case for use as different parts of speech, as is represented by adjective (neuter accusative) > adverb (iūge), or adjective (feminine accusative) > adverb (perperam)?
Yes, it's called "zero-derivation" ("zero" here means that nothing has been altered in the base). Stereotypically the term is used for non-inflected languages (Mandarin 危險 wēixiǎn 'dangerous' > 'danger'), but it can also apply to inflected ones.

Alternatively there is also "fossilization", especially if it's an expression (a fossilized phrase), e.g. Spanish correveidile 'tattler, ratter, telltale', which is literally corre, ve y dile 'run, see and tell him/her'. It takes the plural los correveidiles. Fossilization is better for single words when the ending is used in an unusual way though (as in partim 'partially').
 
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Bitmap

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Yes, it's called "zero-derivation" ("zero" here means that nothing has been altered in the base). Stereotypically the term is used for non-inflected languages (Mandarin 危險 wēixiǎn 'dangerous' > 'danger'), but it can also apply to inflected ones.
I don't think these (Latin examples) are examples of zero-derivation. Mainly because, as you say, that's a term mainly reserved for non-inflected languages. It's weird to call an inflected term a zero-derivation because it lends itself to other word formation processes.
 

Serenus

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I don't think these (Latin examples) are examples of zero-derivation. Mainly because, as you say, that's a term mainly reserved for non-inflected languages. It's weird to call an inflected term a zero-derivation because it lends itself to other word formation processes.
That's perfectly defensible too, yes. You could say that in falsō, speakers quite simply used the neuter ablative -ō as a suffix to derive an adverb. Actually, I think this is the best of the three options I've given.
 

Michael Zwingli

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The sooner you stop believing in that myth the better.
Ah, yes, I'm beginning to understand that, and also that there is more than a fair amount of "semantic corruption" in the history of Latin, as well. The commonly accepted derivation of amare (along with amita) from, essentially, "baby talk", for which, though I am not trained in linguistics, I have an alternate theory, is my pet example for this (To quote a fine 'rustic' gentleman: "it's a bunch of hooey in my opinion", but that's beyond the scope here).
 

Issacus Divus

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Latin played a huge role, it was one of the main languages to pull from for the first proto-PIE theories ("Scythian theory"). Latin preserved the neuter nominative, accusative, and vocative being the same.
 

Issacus Divus

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If you take the interrogatives (quis?) and related things of Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, you get something Hittite looking. Then take the Hittite kuit, and we can deduce kʷis, kʷos, and kʷid. (It's way more complex but that's a general idea.)
 
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Michael Zwingli

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Well, I think it played an important role in reconstructing PIE, but it also has enough of its own peculiarities.
Latin played a huge role...
Agreed, absolutely. Latin preserved much of the grammar of the IE linguistic tradition(including some that bother me,such as what I feel is the overuse of grammatical gender), I believe even more than Ancient Greek. There was, however, quite a bit of particularly semantic corruption in both languages (and in Sanskrit as well, from the little I know of it). I have lately thought that if one were to combine Ancient Greek and Latin, resolving grammatical differences and correcting the most egregious of the corruptions, the result would be one hell of a good language. Cato might have disagreed with me, though, judging by his apparent opinion of Greek culture.
If you take the interrogatives (quis?) and related things of Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, you get something Hittite looking. Then take the Hittite kuit, and we can deduce kʷis, kʷos, and kʷid. (It's way more complex but that's a general idea.)
Super interesting. I know nothing about Hittite, and it would be something I would like to learn a little about. It seems like that learning would bridge many "gaps" in understanding.
 

Michael Zwingli

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Rather more to the instant theme, though, I have been able to discern that adverbs have been formed in Latin from masculine and feminine in both the nominative (Latin satis, versus) and the accusative (Latin perperam, prōmiscam), as well as from the ablative singular (Latin ), in addition to the "petrified" neuter accusative which was the subject hereof. The question about this which occurs to me, is: adverbs have been formed in Latin out of such "petrified" nominatives, accusatives, and ablatives. Is there any rationale for which petrified case form is and has been properly used for the production of the various types of adverb: adverbs of manner, adverbs of time, adverbs of place, adverbs of frequency, and adverbs of degree?
 

Michael Zwingli

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Your right, thanks for the check on that. Rather, the ablative can provide an adverbial clause, the ablative absolute, which does not represent a "frozen" or "petrified" case form. What do you think about rationale for producing different types of adverb...any obvious relationships?
 

Issacus Divus

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Probably whatever the need was and the specific root they were conjugating. Like, there's a theory that roots of adjectives standing alone could function as adverbs in PIE, e.g. *méǵh₂ “greatly”, and *seh₂-tis gives satis, which was a noun, cf. Proto-Celtic *sātis "sufficiency", OI sáith "satiety".

But *seh₂- was also passive in meaning "to be satisfied", so the nominative was with sum to make the adjectiveish satis.
I'm on my phone so it's a bit hard to elaborate on the others at the moment, but I'll organize more thoughts later on.
 
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