Abstract
The origin of the Germanic suffixes forming occupational titles and agent nouns – masculine *-ārijaz (the ancestor of Modern English -er) and its feminine counterpart reflected in Old English as -estre and in Modern as -ster – is an old problem in Germanic historical morphology. The masculine “agentive” suffix, which occurs in all the subgroups of Germanic, is generally presumed to be of Latin origin, though it occurs mostly with native derivational bases even in the earliest attested Germanic languages; the latter is believed to be native, but has no accepted etymology, and its limited range of occurrence in Germanic remains unexplained. It will be argued that the two suffixes are etymologically connected in a hitherto unsuspected way, that the traditional opinion about the origin of *-ārijaz should be revised, and that both suffixes have interesting Indo-European cognates outside Germanic.
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my gratitude to the editors and four anonymous reviewers. I have done my best to improve the argument by implementing their suggestions and responding to their criticism. I am especially indebted to Muriel Norde for her helpful comments on the final draft of the article. All remaining flaws, errors and infelicities are entirely my own.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
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- The trolley rumbled through the tunnel: On the history of the English Intransitive Motion Construction
- Sources of the Notabilia (1427), a medieval handwritten grammatical treatise from the Portuguese monastery of Alcobaça
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- Book Reviews
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- Alexandra Beytenbrat: Case in Russian. A sign-oriented approach
- Uta Reinöhl: Grammaticalization and the rise of configurationality in Indo-Aryan
- Review
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Numerals in Lokono-Wayuunaiki: Reconstruction and implications for internal classification
- The trolley rumbled through the tunnel: On the history of the English Intransitive Motion Construction
- Sources of the Notabilia (1427), a medieval handwritten grammatical treatise from the Portuguese monastery of Alcobaça
- On causative dar and its alternatives in the history of Spanish
- Cherchez la femme: Two Germanic suffixes, one etymology
- Passives and Constructions that resemble passives
- A reconstruction of Proto-Kiranti verb roots
- Linguistic homoplasy and phylogeny reconstruction. The cases of Lezgian and Tsezic languages (North Caucasus)
- Secretary letter-shapes in County Durham
- Proto-Germanic ai in North and West Germanic
- A conceptual perspective of the evolution of Spanish frente from body part to locative/spatial concept and beyond
- Book Reviews
- Dalila Ayoun: The acquisition of the present
- Alexandra Beytenbrat: Case in Russian. A sign-oriented approach
- Uta Reinöhl: Grammaticalization and the rise of configurationality in Indo-Aryan
- Review
- IE3.com. Approaches to databases for Indo-European languages