Do other ‘suffixes’ besides “‑ere/‑ence/‑ither” exist for composing locative and directional ‘adverbs’ like “here/hither/hence”?
Years ago reading J R R Tolkien’s Silmarillion, I learned the delightful suffixes ‑ence and ‑ither used in this threefold set of paired words with these meanings:
- hence: from this nearby place
- hither: toward this nearby place
- thence: from that far place
- thither: toward that far place
- whence: from which place
- whither: toward which place
Recently, as a joke to use such words, I sent a friend an SMS message:
Later I’ll arrive at your place. I will go hence thither, and return thence hither. Haha.
Now in creating this question, I’ve realized that there is at least one more suffix that combines this way, ‑ere:
- here
- there
- where
I hadn’t thought about it as a member of a set of three until today, because it’s in everyday use. But ‑ence and ‑ither have all but vanished from casual everyday speech, and so when someone uses these it makes a spoken or written sentence more interesting.
So we have the set of three prefixes h‑, th-, and wh‑ that all combine with another set of three suffixes ‑ere, ‑ence, and ‑ither to make nine different combinations of derived words we can use as locative and directional ‘adverbs’:
‑ere ‑ence ‑ither
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
h‑ ┃ here hence hither
th- ┃ there thence thither
wh‑ ┃ where whence whither
Or grouped the other direction:
h‑ th- wh‑
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
‑ere ┃ here there where
‑ence ┃ hence thence whence
‑ither ┃ hither thither whither
Do other such suffixes exist that combine with that same threefold prefix-set of [h‑, th-, wh‑] to make more “h‑/th‑/wh‑ words” like these?
Do other such prefixes exist that combine with the same threefold suffix-set of [‑ere, ‑ence, ‑ither] to make more “‑ere/‑ence/‑ither words” like these?
Is there some essay or discussion about these and related elements somewhere out there that explains all this a little?
Extra thought: consider ‑at as some sort of suffix, as in:
- what
- that
- While I’m not sure if there’s ever been a word starting with h‑ for ‘nearby’, everyone knows the idiom this, that, the other, so I could suggest this instead of ✻hat which appears not to exist. Right?
Another extra thought: also consider ‑en as some sort of suffix, as in:
- when
- then
- Why is ✻hen also missing here like ✻hat is missing from the set of three ‑at words just given above?
What an interesting phenomenon, thanks for asking the question. In trying to find similar instances, it occurred* to me that there's a relationship between the prefixes of the 5 W's; although not locative or directional, their is a narrative relationship: 'who, what, where, when, why'.
I originally thought of this in Spanish: who = quien, what = que, when = cuando, and (por) que (what for). The qu and c's are basically equivalent because of their k sound (in Italian the words are also mixed between qu, c and che, a hard k sound, and why is also 'what for'.) This may just be coincidence, since the words for where--donde in Spanish, dove in Italian--while obviously related to each other, have no Latin root (that I can find), and the Latin for where, quo, would create 5, rather than 4 q/c/ch/k's.
I'd be interested in any thoughts on the Spanish/Italian equivalents to the English counterparts, and their relationships to each other (not to mention the missing where--well, you'd need a 'where' to find out where the where is, wouldn't you?!
Thanks to all for the interesting posts.
*(I understand the double r in the past tense, but why the double c in occur?)
"-wards" can be locative suffixes that turn a noun into an adverb: viz. homewards, onwards, upwards, downwards, inwards.
"-wise" is another, as in clockwise, counterclockwise (or anticlockwise) and the less-common edgewise, lengthwise, leftwise, and rightwise. Wiktionary has a long list under "Derived terms."