On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, Steven Brust wrote:
#At 07:25 PM 8/15/2002 +0100, Mike Scott wrote:
#>Sure it could. There is clearly a linguistic niche for a gerundive
#>meaning "it is to be hoped".
#
#Why? That is, what does "it is to be hoped" mean? It is to be hoped by
#*whom*? By persons unknown? Why say that? By you? Then say, "I
#hope." By me? Then say, "You should hope." By all right-thinking
#people? Then say that. Why this insistence on vagueness?
Let us ban the word "obviously". Why? Obvious to whom? To persons
unknown? Why say that? To you? Then say, "It's obvious to me." To me?
Then say, "It should be obvious to you." By all right-thinking people?
Then say that. Why this insistence on vagueness?
(What's that? You say those expressions are all too long to be easy?
Namby-pamby kids! Why, when I was a boy, by the time we finished saying
"Good morning, teacher!" it was time for lunch!)
#In fact, "hopefully" in its vague use developed from the German word that
#sounds like it but that I can't possibly spell--something like
#huffentlich. I asked my father (German lit. professor) what that word
#meant, and he said, with no hesitation, "I hope."
You asked your father to translate a German word ("hoeffentlich", or
replace the "oe" with an o-umlaut) into English. English has no precise
translation for it, other than "it is to be hoped". Therefore your
father translated it into the most convenient approximation; but it is
not an exact translation.
Another point. You, Steve, or someone else in this thread, have spoken
of the potential confusion between this use of "hopefully" and its more
traditional use to refer to the emotional state in which a person does
something. But the two uses are no more likely to be confused than the
two senses of "comfortable" when applied to a chair and to a person...
neither of which means "capable of being comforted", as one would expect
>from analyzing the parts of the word. The newer, and currently more
common (imho), use of "hopefully", as a sentence adverb, is rarely used
in a way that would make sense if interpreted emotionally, and often it
would not even be grammatical. ISTM that objecting to a sentence like
"Hopefully the job will be finished on time"
on the grounds that
(1) a job can't hope and
(2) that's not what the speaker means
is no more reasonable than objecting to
"Are you comfortable?"
on the grounds that
(1) no one is sitting on the addressee and
(2) that's not what the speaker means.
(But I'm pretty sure that some people *did* object to "are you
comfortable?" in the third quarter of the 18th century, when what the
OED calls the "passive or neuter" sense of "comfortable" came into use.)
Summary: The sentence-adverbial use of "hopefully" is not confusing,
does not supplant the emotional sense, and provides a short, convenient
way of saying something useful.
God, this is fun!
-- Mark A. Mandel