grammaticality - Why not 'somewhy'?


For this ELL question, a desire for concision motivated me originally to use 'somewhy' instead of 'for some reason'; afterwards, a user kindly advised that 'somewhy' obsolesced. Why?


Google introduced me to http://somewhy.com/, whose author delineates his confusion of the absence and his reasoning justifying 'somewhy' (identical to mine). Though his questions have not been answered and
" "Somewhy" didn't appear in the dictionaries I [he] checked " ,
OED's entry does not answer our questions either:



somewhy {adv.} = {rare.} For some reason or reasons.



Postscript: I read this Wikipedia page on pro-form, which displays the correlatives for 'why', but doesn't explain their obscurity. The lone prevalent exception is 'therefore'.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

verbs - "Baby is creeping" vs. "baby is crawling" in AmE

commas - Does this sentence have too many subjunctives?

grammatical number - Use of lone apostrophe for plural?

etymology - Where does the phrase "doctored" originate?

phrases - Somebody is gonna kiss the donkey

typography - When a dagger is used to indicate a note, must it come after an asterisk?

etymology - Origin of "s--t eating grin"