Talk:Hopefully

"hoffnungsvoll" vs. "hoffentlich"
Hello, here's a source of potential confusion:

1. "to hope" (verb) = German "hoffen)

2. "hope" (noun) = German "Hoffnung"

3. "full"/"-ful" = German "voll"/"-voll"

4. "-ly" = German "-lich"

5. "hopefully" in the sense of "it is to be hoped that"/"I hope that" = German "hoffentlich" From hoffen + lich, i.e. "to hope" + "-ly". (In Middle High German, it used to be "hoffenlich" (without the "t"), cf. https://www.dwds.de/wb/hoffentlich )

6. "hopefully" in the sense of "full of hope", "in a hopeful manner" = German "hoffnungsvoll" From Hoffnung + "-voll", i.e. "hope" (noun) + "-ful"

Thus even though it is true that "hopefully" is *used* analogously to "hoffentlich" in most cases, the word has ironically not been formed from analogous elements, and in fact a word that *has* been formed analogously does exist ("hoffnungsvoll") and translates as "hopeful/hopefully" too, but not in the sense discussed in this Wikipedia article, i.e. not in the sense of "it is to be hoped that", but in the sense of "full of hope".

(I'm a native speaker of German.)

--80.187.105.82 (talk) 13:14, 21 April 2018 (UTC)


 * Since that isn't consistent with the source, it would be considered original research. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 16:29, 21 April 2018 (UTC)


 * Neither of these contributions makes clear what these colleagues think the accompanying article should contain. I label this Talk section as  Musings  pending a consensus that it has evolved substantially toward formulating clear proposals on how to improve the article. My own attention will for now go toward making it into a (lexicographically informed) discussion of the historic and current usage, and the lexicographic, grammatogical, and practical rationales for and against making the article move in the direction of reflecting the assertions and implicit usage advice that these two colleagues appear (to me) to be advocating. --JerzyA (talk) 02:49, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

Sentence adverbs to convey the mood, attitude or sentiments of the speaker
According to Disjunct_(linguistics) Sentence adverbs convey the mood, attitude or sentiments of the speaker. Yet, Sentence adverbs form a completely standard aspect of English grammar, but there are a few, for example, hopefully, that give rise to widespread criticism as they express the user's attitude to the sentence content rather than modify the sentence as a whole. Others that may incur criticism in the same way are mercifully, thankfully, and truthfully. In formal contexts, writers are advised to avoid all these and simply recast their sentences accordingly ( https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=hopefully). --Backinstadiums (talk) 09:02, 30 May 2021 (UTC)