350 Mostly Medieval Perhaps is the most common single-word sentential adverb of low probability especially in British English. In American English the word is perceived as somewhat formal and maybe appears to be more common in colloquial speech. 10. Conclusion Although some words containing the root hæp- had limited occurrence in Old English, it looks that the cognate Old Norse root hap- was the major source of new Middle English words (and their derivatives) discussed in this article: the noun hap, the adjective happy, the adverb happily, the verb happen and the epistemic adverb perhaps. Except for the noun, all the others are important high frequency words in Present-day English. The common semantic feature that can be attributed to all these words is the sense of ‘fate, chance, luck’ found in the Old Norse etymon and the Middle English noun hap. The adjective happy thus was a regular English formation from both a morphological and semantic point of view. Likewise, the adverb happily was formed according to the usual adverb formation rule by adding -ly, -liche. The element of chance and fate is also a part of the sense of the verb happen. Finally, the Romance-Norse hybrid adverb perhaps was grammaticalized from the original prepositional phrase meaning ‘by chance’ and ‘perhaps.’ After all these words were adopted into English, each of them independently followed different semantic paths of developing new meanings and dropping some of the earlier ones. After centuries of multiple synonymy or lexical layering (cf. Martín Arista 2011, 2014, Molencki 2018), all of them gradually eliminated their earlier synonyms which had arisen in Old English. Another interesting observation is that at the time when the English language borrowed thousands of abstract words of Romance (Anglo-Norman and Latin) origin, in this case it chose to develop new abstract words on the basis of an Old Norse root. References Dictionaries and Corpora The Anglo–Norman Dictionary. Aberystwyth, UK: University of Aberystwyth. Retrieved from http://www.anglo-norman.net/gate [AND] Bosworth, Joseph, Thomas Northcote Toller (1898) An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Based on the Manuscript Collections of the Late Joseph Bosworth. Edited and enlarged by T. Northcote Toller. (1921) Supplement by Thomas Northcote Toller. (1972)
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