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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
Grant Barrett
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