Families of Verbs

I recently finished reading “American Gods” by Neil Gaiman. In the notes at the end Gaiman writes:
 

 “And then one day about three weeks ago it was done. And after that I spent a week cutting and trimming it. (I’d read Stephen King’s On Writing on the plane home from Ireland, where I’d gone to do final rewrites and reworkings, and was fired up enough by his war on adverbs that I did a search through the manuscript for ——-ly, and peered at each adverb suspiciously before letting it live or zapping it into oblivion. A lot of them survived. Still, according to the old proverb, God is better pleased with adverbs than with nouns. . .)”
 

A lot more words are adverbs than most people think! Only some of them end in “-ly”. Vetting the “-ly” adverbs you use in a manuscript is not that bad an idea, however. Vetting the passive voice sentences is another good idea.

King seems to particularly discourage the use of adverbs in dialogue attribution. ie, use “she said” rather than “she said, quietly”. However, English gives us many options to achieve the latter without using an adverb: “she whispered”, “she muttered”, “she mumbled”, “she gasped” etc.

At the same time “lookoo’s” wonderful stuff on deviant art got me looking into Cheyenne grammar. Cheyenne verbs have a pre-verbal that works as an adverbial suffix. This suggest that a language such as Diinlang may have potential of families of related verbs formed by compounding: quiet-say, vague-say, breathe-say; fast-walk, slow-walk, vague-walk (dawdle), rural-walk (hike), escape-run (flee), attack-run (charge).

This infers Diinlang might have two classes of adverb: those acting directly on a verb and those that affect other parts of speech.