At 13:41 -0700 15.8.2002, Steven Brust wrote: > At 02:57 PM 8/15/2002 -0500, David Dyer-Bennet wrote: > > > >What evidence is there for blaming this innocent German word for the > >abuse of "hopefully", though? I mean, it looks reasonable on the face > >of it, but we all know how reliable *that* is! > > Dammit, I no longer remember my source on that one. It came up in a > discussion about fifteen years ago, before I was willing to concede the > battle lost. This is in the back of my head as well; I'm sure it came up in one of my "history of the German language" classes (I'm working on my Ph.D. in German Literature) several years ago, but I can't recall the details. It's certainly true that the German word "hoffentlich" (no umlaut -- they don't put umlauts on *everything* in German, you know!) sounds a bit like 'hopefully' but means 'I hope; hopingly'. But the Germans also have "hoffnungsvoll" which is the direct equivalent of 'hopeful, full of hope'. So I don't quite understand why German gets blamed, either. The only source I could find online was an article from the 1990 Verbatim Language Quarterly, which blames the 'hopefully' issue on German speakers trying to speak English; the author states in part: "Alas, it was only a beginning. Germans who wanted to translate their word interessanterweise into English tried 'interestingly,' which in those days sounded horrible to British ears; but the Americans at once pounded on it. There followed a number of other, similar formations, such as 'importantly.' Americans must have realized about this time that the German ending -weise has an English equivalent. and this was accordingly resuscitated: the old likewise and crosswise family was joined by neologisms like countrywise and stylewise. Then came hopefully, a word which had long existed in English and meant 'in a hopeful manner': you could apply for a job hopefully because you were 'full of hope.' The Germans, however, stumbled upon hopefully because they wanted a word for their own hoffentlich, admittedly a useful word; so hopefully was soon being used in a quite different sense, viz. to mean 'it is to be hoped.' Consequently we now have a measure of confusion, which, be it noted, is not shared by the Germans, as they have two different words for the two senses: hoffentlich for 'it is to be hoped,' and hoffnungsvoll for 'hopeful(ly).'" He also implies that the change took widespread effect after WWII, but that it had started to creep in before that. Unfortunately I don't see that he provides any real citations or proof, and that's the only source I immediately saw, so I'll reserve my judgement for now as to whether to blame it on the Germans! :) - Nancy.