Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Where, here, and there: What is the origin, and can it be generalized?

+7
−0

I recently stumbled upon this wikipedia page and it got me thinking. Take a look at the following table (terms are lifted from the Wikipedia page)

W (interrogative) H (proximal) T (medial)
what ? that
when ? then
whence hence thence
whither hither thither
where here there

These are the ones that I could find an obvious correspondence for, but I'm curious about the general pattern, especially since there are a number of outliers ("who" has no corresponding H- or T-word, for example, and "these" has no W- or H- word).

Was this a general form at some point, and English simply lost some of the entries that would be in this table, or were these the only cases where the W-H-T forms have ever existed? If the former, what were those lost forms? If the latter, why?

History
Why does this post require moderator attention?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

1 comment thread

English did lose some entries and not just entries (6 comments)

0 answers

Sign up to answer this question »