u/Smitologyistaking

Usually "home" is a clear noun, but this is a rare case where it (in the singular) doesn't require any determiner. Another such example I've seen is "I will go downtown" (at least this is how I've observed it being used by users of "downtown", it isn't used in my idiolect).

I can also see how this could also be analysed as an adverb, modifying the exact nature of the "going". Normally to specify the location one goes to, a "to" dative is used instead eg: "I will go to the park" or "I will go to a friend's place".

I'm also curious about the cross-linguistic status of "home" being special in this sense because the other language I know (Marathi) also has a similar pattern. Old Marathi historically had a "-i" locative suffix which has since stopped being productive, and it only survives in a small handful of words which have come to have, much like the example in English, an adverbial use modifying the nature of a verb. Eg there's the word "घर​" (ghər) = "house/home" but adding that suffix gives "घरी" (ghəri) such as in "मी घरी जाईन​" (mi ghəri zain) = "I will go home". Again, this suffix isn't productive and cannot be applied to most nouns.

Again, this is a special scenario for the word for "home". "-i" is completely non-productive and cannot be applied to any arbitrary noun, much like most English nouns cannot be zero-derived into an adverb. "झाड​​" (zhaḍ) means "tree" yet trying to say "मी झाडी जाईन​" (mi zhaḍi zain) is ungrammatical much like "I will go tree" is ungrammatical. Is it cross-linguistically (or even just within Indo-European languages) common for "home" to have a specific adverb derivation or is it a linguistic coincidence between English and Marathi?

As someone who more or less has the weak vowel merger, learning about that merger is what led me to wondering about this in the first place.

One minimal pair example is "chicken" vs "thicken", which do not rhyme for people without the merger, "chicken" having a /ɪ/ sound in its second syllable and "thicken" having a /ə/ sound. This was news to me because I always assumed that if they were etymologically different sounds, they would be spelt with different letters given how English orthography generally reflects the phonemes of the language in the late Middle / early Modern stage of the language.

So where did that /ɪ/ come from? The Old English word is "cicen" with a weak /e/ vowel, and then apparently Middle English merged all these weak vowels to a single schwa sound. I can't find where /ɪ/ shows up in any of this.

Likewise the other common minimal pair I see is "Rosa's" vs "roses", where the plural suffix has an /ɪ/ in dialects without the merger. But where did it come from? The Old English suffix was "-as" with a weak /a/ vowel that likewise got merged into schwa in Middle English.

In all resources about the weak vowel merger I see it depicted as the people without the merger preserving some old quality of the weak vowels that people with the merger lost, but I can't find any evidence that this distinction even existed in the Middle English period. Nor can I find any sound law that caused /ə/ to raise to /ɪ/ in certain contexts. It genuinely feels like I'm going crazy here.