Lil (to Johnny): “Did you know your name is an adverb?”
Johnny Dangerously (1984)
…
What are some good examples of surnames that happen to share the same spelling OR the same sound with adverbs (IOW, both homonyms and homophones count)? Interested in both English examples and examples from other languages.
In English, “Fairly/Fairley” was the first one to come to mind. “Lively” is not all that uncommon, and still has adverbial usages. I have also run across the surname “Gravely”. There must be many more in English – even some not ending in -ly – that I just can’t come up with right now.
I was thinking there had to be some from the Romance languages ending in -ment(e) and some from Germanic languages ending in -lich/-lik (or similar). Even if their similarities to actual adverbs are pure coincidence.
If anyone has examples from any of Asian or African languages, please feel free to mention them.
First example that came to my mind is Heiko Herrlich, a former German soccer player and now coach. Note that “herrlich” is both the adjective and adverbial form, it means magnificent or magnificently. Another German surname of that kind that comes to mind is “Fröhlich”, meaning happy/happily. I’m sure there are much more examples in German, but my mind is a bit lazy today because it’s the hottest day of the summer so far here in Germany.
P.S: got one more I already heard: “Redlich”, which means righteous/righteously.
If in German, adverbs and adjectives often have the same form (and I don’t know but Einsteinshund made me think possibly) then I’d think there would be lots of them. There are many adjectives used as surnames in English starting with many colors and other physical descriptors like tall, short, strong, etc.
These can all be adverbs in English, and are common or fairly common surnames:
best
small
little
short
close
bright
wild
strange
rather
early (common Irish surname, etymology unrelated)
right (obviously Wright is much more common)
Yeah, you thought right: German doesn’t really make a difference between adjectives and adverbs, the first I ever heard about a thing called “adverbs” was in my English class in fifth grade. But I have always thought that the ending -lich of many German adjectives was related to the English adverbial suffix -ly (but that’s just a hunch), so I was looking for examples of that sort. Of course there are surnames like Groß, Klein, Kurz, Stark as well as Rot(h), Grün, Braun, Schwarz and so on all over the place, which CAN be adverbs.
Interestingly, there are variants of adjectives representing colors with the -lich suffix, like “rötlich” or “bräunlich”, which have no adverbial meaning, but simply mean “reddish” and “brownish”.
A few searches for the most probable Swedish ones at eniro.se gave me Anna Lätt (= lightly/easily), Giovanni Fort (= speedily) and Asus Kort (= shortly). I’m sure there must be at least a dozen more.
I take that back. There are some uncommon adverbial uses for some of these, mostly in set phrases; for example, “to fall short” and “to run wild”. I still don’t see examples for the others though.
No, they can all be adverbs, although most are more commonly adjectives. I’m not going to go through them all - just Google the word + adverb for examples. If there’s any particular one or two that remain that you dispute I’ll be happy to find you an example.
I once was heading over to an office to meet with some new lawyers that the other side had hired, and they sent me an email telling me to “go to the seventh floor lobby and ask for Matthew Nicely.”
it took me a moment to figure out that that was his name; my first reaction was to think, “Don’t tell me how to talk to people!”
