adverbial rarity in Aramaic

[gregglaser]

One of the things that surprised me during my early studies of Aramaic was the rarity of pure adverbs. 

A pure adverb in Aramaic contains the suffix ܐܝܬ (“having”) because the noun “has” the quality of that verb.  See e.g., G. Kiraz, The New Syriac Primer (2007), p. 148 ("Adverbs in Syriac have the ending ܐܝܬ").

For example, there are only four of these ‘pure adverbs’* in the Crawford Codex of Revelation:

• 4:8 ܚܙܕܪܢܐܝܬ (“surrounding”)
  
• 11:8 ܪܘܚܢܐܝܬ (“spiritually”)
  
• 19:10 ܝܬܝܪܐܝܬ (“abundantly”)
  
• 21:16 ܡܪܒܥܐܝܬ (“four-square”)
  

• * Note, that I’m excluding from this list the following proper nouns, even though they have a root adverbial quality: two instances of ܥܒܪܐܝܬ (“Hebrew”) and one instance of  ܐܪܡܐܝܬ(“Aramaic”).  I’m also omitting complex quasi-adverbial conjugations like 4:8 ܐܪܒܥܬܝܗܝܢ (“being a foursome”).  Lastly, I'm simplifying the subject of Aramaic adverbs.
  

Notably, professor John Gwynn in his grammatical analysis of the Crawford Codex never discusses this particular issue of adverbs.  Perhaps he didn’t know what deduction to make from their relative absence?  From my preliminary research, I’ve found adverbs are more common in Koine Greek. 

For example, in the Crawford Aramaic of Revelation 22:7 the word ܒܥܔܠ (“soon”) is an adjective (not an adverb).  But the Greek version of Revelation 22:7 has an adverb.

I suppose I would expect to see more adverbs in an Aramaic text if it were translated from another language.  Certainly in English, we usually write adverbs liberally

Curious if anyone has studies to share on this topic?

I think this would be a good research project for an Aramaic student – ‘adverbial rarity’ in the context of split words is another branch on the tree of Aramaic primacy.