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In a recent e-mail I advised a colleague that a certain topic needed “to be specifically and publicly addressed … .” It got me wondering why publicly is such an oddball when most of the adverbs related to adjectives ending in -ic are formed with -ically. In my research, I see that some sources allow for publically, but that seems very odd. Several other sources also allow for a few other -ic adjectives to form -icly, but they also seem odd.
What are your thoughts?
Glenn,
I do not have many thoughts, but I found this website. It is for users of Scrabble type games and you can do wildcard searches for words. It only finds ten words that end in icly (by using *icly). It finds 28 words with *lically and 1030 words with *ically. Obviously, the 28 are contained in the 1030. And, some of the dually formed words you note are also dual listed.
Maybe some insight can be gleaned from these lists.
Emmett
I can’t explain it, but I can add a probably-useless factoid which someone may turn into something less useless after all: “-ical” is redundant, in that -ik- is the Greek suffix for turning a noun into an adjective and -al- is the Latin version of the same thing. Once the Romans took a lot of Greek slaves in the wars, the Greek culture and language infected much of the Roman, so I don’t know whether the combination “-ical” came to us straight from Latin or from later Europeans, who for centuries used both languages when writing across language barriers.
Hey, wait a minute: What are the 12 words that end in -icly, EmmetRedd? “Public” is from a Latin root, not Greek; might the others be too? I don’t have a theory yet, I’m just hunting around for a pattern.
The ten words are:
anticly
chicly
cubicly
cyclicly
hecticly
impoliticly
mysticly
publicly
rusticly
unchicly
From memory of comparing the lists at the time shortly after I posted, except for chicly and unchicly, they also appear in the list of -ically words. I note that chic is monosyllabic and the others are not. And, the OED says the French has uncertain origin but lists the German schick as a possible origin. If it is German and the others are Greek or Latin, that might make a difference.
Emmett
Yeah, I don’t see any help there. “Cub-” and “publ-” are pure Latin; “cycl-” and “myst-” are pure Greek; and I think “polit-” was originally Greek and then was adopted in Rome. I’m pretty sure “rust-” is Latin, and “hect-” is probably Greek, but the others I’d have to look up, and anyway I don’t think I’m going to find a pattern.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
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