Are adverbs mere adjective spinoffs?
I’ve also anecdotally noticed that words that had previously worked as adverbs, like “quick” or “slow,” are now reconstructed as “quickly” and “slowly.” If I could piggyback on this question, I’d also be interested in hearing from one of the linguist types around here why this has conspicuously not happened with “fast.” For instance, “You’re driving too fast” is correct, while only a non-native speaker would even think to say “fastly.
I can’t answer the history part, but you might find this tangentially interesting: Sometimes when people correct an adjective to an adverb, they’re actually wrong (disclaimer: wrong in the technical sense, anyway). Just because something is a verb does not mean only adverbs can touch it. For example, it’s correct to say “I feel bad” whereas “I feel badly” means something else entirely, but someone might still claim you’re supposed to say “I feel badly.” For things like feelings, or most things having to do with our senses, you’re supposed to take the adjective form. “I smell bad” means that you stink, whereas “I smell badly,” means that your sense of smell is poor. “Broccoli tastes bad” means, well, exactly what it sounds like, but “Broccoli tastes badly,” means that the broccoli has become sentient, though it’s a cursed existence where it can’t taste much of anything. It has excellent hearing, though. I don’t like to say that anything is objectively wrong in language, because there’s
