Whither the adverbs of place?
In contemporary English, here refers to the speaker’s location regardless of whether the sentence involves things or people remaining in that place, moving to that place, or leaving that place. We say I have been waiting here for hours or Come here! or Get out of here! But historically English has used three separate adverbs to convey these three different relations to place. A speaker of the sixteenth century might have said I have been waiting here for hours, but she would have said Come hither! instead of Come here! and Get thee hence! instead of Get out of here!
Likewise, when referring to a location other than where we are, we now use there indiscriminately: Who is there? I will take you there. We sailed from Ireland to Iceland and from there to Greenland. Our sixteenth-century speaker, for her part, might have said Who is there? but I will take you thither or We sailed from Ireland to Iceland and thence to Greenland.
Finally, for asking about places, though English relies now on just where, there were once three separate adverbs. If our twenty-first-century speaker says Where am I? or Where are you going? or Where is that smell coming from? our hypothetical Elizabethan speaker might say Where am I? or Whither goest thou? or Whence cometh that reek?
The astute reader will recognize a pattern in these sets of adverbs. Those dealing with the speaker’s location all begin with h-, those dealing with another known location begin with th-, and those dealing with an unknown location begin with wh-. Furthermore, those adverbs describing circumstances at a place end in –ere, those describing motion toward a place end in –ither, and those describing motion away from a place end in –ence:
This place: That place: What place:
At a place: here there where
To a place: hither thither whither
From a place: hence thence whence
Of course, the adverbs in the lower two rows of this grid haven’t dropped entirely out of use in English; they all survive to one degree or another. Hither lives on in the adjective come-hither, as in “a come-hither look,” as well as in the idiom hither and yon, and hence still sees frequent service as an adverb, though nowadays we use it more to mean “for that reason” rather than “from this place.” And whither remains perennially popular in titles of magazine articles and newspaper opinion pieces, where “Whither X?” is used as shorthand for “What is happening or going to happen to X?” in titles like “Whither the Democratic Party”? or “Whither the Music Industry?” or “Whither the American Male?”
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