Thread: Разные вопросы по грамматике (by tiudavidharris

Originally Posted by car

In English they can't either, it's a matter of spelling. They could write it as "fromhere", what it really is, just like the Russian отсюда could be safely written as от сюда, because it is etymologically a combination of от + сюда; the only difference is that Russian has the distinct static "here" (здесь) and dynamic "here" (сюда), and in our case we use the latter word because "from here" is dynamic.

My dictionary says that in English there are both a noun "here" and an adverb "here". In Russian "здесь", "сюда", "отсюда", "досюда" ... are adverbs only, so no prepositions and no declining.

Originally Posted by it-ogo

My dictionary says that in English there are both a noun "here" and an adverb "here".

I'm not sure about this, maybe a late misconcieved grammaticalization, like double negations, natural to the language, were banned because they are "contrary to the logic". Etymologically in Germanic languages "her" is an adverb, and it was substantivated in English as a noun only later, not a rare event. In Russian we have combinations of от- + сюда as well and there is no noun "сюда", although the compound is absolutely same. I only meant that it's simply a matter of spelling convention. French d'ici, German von hier (why not vonhier?) etc.

Originally Posted by car

I'm not sure about this, maybe a late misconcieved grammaticalization, like double negations, natural to the language, were banned because they are "contrary to the logic". Etymologically in Germanic languages "her" is an adverb, and it was substantivated in English as a noun only later, not a rare event. In Russian we have combinations of от- + сюда as well and there is no noun "сюда", although the compound is absolutely same. I only meant that it's simply a matter of spelling convention. French d'ici, German von hier (why not vonhier?) etc.

Well I am not old enough to remember times when "here" was not used as a noun. AFAIK, word class is defined neither by etymology nor by spelling but by the actual current usage of the word. Составные наречия (compound adverbs?) do exist in both English and Russian. E.g. "At first" is one adverb.

I believe the description of actual use of "here" in English as it is accepted now is OK. If one can use "here" in English with virtually any preposition and gain some sense, it is a noun de facto. There are not only "from here" and "to here" but much more.

On the other hand one can't use any article with it, but there are a number of apparent nouns (like today-tomorrow-yesterday) which denote a unique object rather than class and are not used with articles and in plural. And sometimes they are used as adverbs as well.