elsewhen/anderswann, elsewhy/anderswarum and so on
Just recently I noticed that while there are words such as elsewhere, anderswo and annarsstaðar, we don't seem to have the equivalents for other things one could want to talk about using appropriate adverbs, such as time, manner, reason and so on. Put more simply, there is no elsewhen, elsehow, elsewhy and so on; we have to resort to somewhat stilted constructions and say at another time, in another manner, for another reason and so on.
Well, no more. Languages are inherently productive, linguistic prescriptivism is dead, and if you're a human being endowed with the ability to speak (in a very general sense), then you may engage in wordcoinery as you please. That's what I'm doing, so the following are now words in my English and my German:
- elsewhen, anderswann (colloquial spoken German already has wann anders)
- elsehow, anderswie
- elsewhy, anderswarum
- elsewhither (German already has woandershin)
- elsewhence (German already has woandersher)
Feel free to suggest improvements, alternatives, and additions. kalogrenant may recall that I used anderswarum in a conversation with him recently; it allowed me to express what I wanted to say more succinctly.
I'm not including ones for Icelandic here since I feel my Icelandic is not sufficiently developed yet for me to extend it this way; my focus is still on learning the standard language as it is spoken.
BTW, Esperanto is much more systematic about this sort of thing, and I'm sure any learner of Esperanto will have encountered the following table of tabelvortoj (table words) early on:
Image: moi
'course, there's no prefix indicating an alternative. Maybe there should be one.
Side note: this table is one of the reasons why I always have to grin when I see a Kia Picanto. It sounds like an exasperated sigh of frustration in Esperanto: kia picanto!