> A comment from Britain on the disappearance of '-ly'.

This is now the normal rule in Britain for common non-standard English
speakers :

e.g. 'We can leave the car park quicker this way' [not 'more quickly']

'She ran too close to the next runner' [not 'closely']

'The only way to avoid getting fat is to eat moderate.'

'Beckham passed the ball real neat to Rooney' [not 'really neatly'].  This
was heard on the BBC radio 'Today' Programme, which has a huge audience.  It
is de rigueur for BBC football commentators, both on radio and TV, to speak
with a passable vernacular accent, vocabulary and grammar -- though not
cricket commentators!

'The police drove slow down the avenue' [not 'slowly']

'The bus passes here frequent' [not 'frequently' -- adverb of time]

Even 'good' is heard instead of 'well' in the abverb slot:  'You did good in
that last throw'.

Adverbs of number that are ordinals ('first', 'second', 'third', etc.) are
very rarely heard or written here with the suffix '-ly' even by speakers of
standard English:  e.g.  'Second, you've to remove the washer' is what would
be said, and not 'Secondly, you've to remove the washer'.

It is no surprise that 'ly' is disappearing since very few children in
British schools receive any thorough training in grammar as a result of the
neo-romantic reaction against it in the sixties, which led to its removal
from all examination syllabuses for secondary pupils.  It lasted so long
that few teachers have any really secure knowledge of grammar.  So not many
pupils in English schools could tell you why an adverb is required in the
sentences above.  The underlying motive of this distaste for grammar was the
suspicion that it acted as a filter against working-class pupils, whereas it
was actually an aid to them.  The result has been to exacerbate the already
strong class-difference in speech that is particularly typical of England
(rather than Scotland, Wales and Ireland).

The absence of '-ly' can be taken as one of the unconscious, anti-authority,
peer-group bonding signals among state-school adolescents today, comparable
to the glottal stop (saying, instead of 'better', 'be'er' -- the 't' having
vanished).  Some of my pupils used to protest that that they could not say
't'.  I used to ask them to say the numbers from thirteen upwards:  the
glottal stop would be there for 'thirteen' ('thir'een') and fourteen
('four'een'), but the 't' suddenly reappeared in 'fifteen', since 'fif'een'
sounds very peculiar!

To judge from the history of language, the normal rule for the majority
usually wins out, so perhaps '-ly' will disappear.

Edmond Wright


Dr. Edmond Wright
3 Boathouse Court
Trafalgar Road
Cambridge
CB4 1DU
England

Email: [log in to unmask]
Website: http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~elw33
Phone [00 44] (0)1223 350256

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