“A heavily used little grammar word has a way of becoming a toolshed. After a while, it actually is a syllable of other words, and can never stand alone—the birth of a prefix or suffix. A good example is the -ly that forms adverbs like slowly and gently. It started as the word like (pronounced “leek” back then). That’s easy to imagine because even today we can still say slow-like to mean “in a slow fashion.” Used that way constantly, however, like lost the accent it once had. You hit the like in slow-like fairly hard, but the -ly in slowly not so much. Mumbled, it lost its final consonant—“leek” became “lee.”