Do other ‘suffix­es’ be­sides “‑ere/‑ence/‑ither” ex­ist for com­pos­ing loca­tive and di­rec­tional ‘ad­verbs’ like “here/hither/hence”?

Question

Years ago read­ing J R R Tolkien’s Sil­mar­il­lion, I learned the de­light­ful suffixes ‑ence and ‑ither used in this three­fold set of paired words with these mean­ings:

1. hence: from this nearby place
2. hither: toward this nearby place
3. thence: from that far place
4. thither: toward that far place
5. whence: from which place
6. whither: toward which place

Recently, as a joke to use such words, I sent a friend an SMS message:

Later I’ll arrive at your place. I will go hence thither, and return thence hither. Haha.

Now in cre­at­ing this ques­tion, I’ve re­al­ized that there is at least one more suffix that com­bines this way, ‑ere:

1. here
2. there
3. where

I had­n’t thought about it as a mem­ber of a set of three un­til to­day, be­cause it’s in ev­ery­day use. But ‑ence and ‑ither have all but van­ished from ca­sual ev­ery­day speech, and so when some­one uses these it makes a spo­ken or writ­ten sen­tence more in­ter­est­ing.

So we have the set of three prefixes h‑, th-, and wh‑ that all com­bine with an­other set of three suffixes ‑ere, ‑ence, and ‑ither to make nine dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions of de­rived words we can use as loca­tive and di­rec­tional ‘ad­verbs’:

           ‑ere    ‑ence    ‑ither
       ┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
   h‑  ┃   here    hence    hither
  th-  ┃  there   thence   thither
  wh‑  ┃  where   whence   whither

Or grouped the other direction:

          h‑      th-      wh‑
       ┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
  ‑ere ┃  here    there    where
 ‑ence ┃  hence   thence   whence
‑ither ┃  hither  thither  whither

Do other such suffixes ex­ist that com­bine with that same three­fold prefix-set of [h‑, th-, wh‑] to make more “h‑/th‑/wh‑ words” like these?

Do other such prefixes ex­ist that com­bine with the same three­fold suffix-set of [‑ere, ‑ence, ‑ither] to make more “‑ere/‑ence/‑ither words” like these?

Is there some es­say or dis­cus­sion about these and re­lated el­e­ments some­where out there that ex­plains all this a lit­tle?

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Ex­tra thought: con­sider ‑at as some sort of suffix, as in:

1. what
2. that
3. While I’m not sure if there’s ever been a word start­ing with h‑ for ‘near­by’, ev­ery­one knows the id­iom this, that, the other, so I could sug­gest this in­stead of ✻hat which ap­pears not to ex­ist. Right?

Another ex­tra thought: also con­sider ‑en as some sort of suffix, as in:

1. when
2. then
3. Why is ✻hen also miss­ing here like ✻hat is miss­ing from the set of three ‑at words just given above?

Answer 1

What an interesting phenomenon, thanks for asking the question. In trying to find similar instances, it occurred* to me that there's a relationship between the prefixes of the 5 W's; although not locative or directional, their is a narrative relationship: 'who, what, where, when, why'.

I originally thought of this in Spanish: who = quien, what = que, when = cuando, and (por) que (what for). The qu and c's are basically equivalent because of their k sound (in Italian the words are also mixed between qu, c and che, a hard k sound, and why is also 'what for'.) This may just be coincidence, since the words for where--donde in Spanish, dove in Italian--while obviously related to each other, have no Latin root (that I can find), and the Latin for where, quo, would create 5, rather than 4 q/c/ch/k's.

I'd be interested in any thoughts on the Spanish/Italian equivalents to the English counterparts, and their relationships to each other (not to mention the missing where--well, you'd need a 'where' to find out where the where is, wouldn't you?!

Thanks to all for the interesting posts.

*(I understand the double r in the past tense, but why the double c in occur?)

Answer 2

"-wards" can be locative suffixes that turn a noun into an adverb: viz. homewards, onwards, upwards, downwards, inwards.

Answer 3

"-wise" is another, as in clockwise, counterclockwise (or anticlockwise) and the less-common edgewise, lengthwise, leftwise, and rightwise. Wiktionary has a long list under "Derived terms."