Why Can't the English....?

Don't know why it just occured to me, but WHY do we call someone who dances a dancER; who sings, a singER; who writes, a writER; ...etc....; but we call someone who acts an actOR..??

OR WHAT ?





Cheers,
Craig

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Basically if the agent noun is taken from the Latin, then it keeps a form reflecting its ending in that language. "Auctor" in Latin becomes "actor" in English. The same is true of "counsellor" for example. If the word is formed without a Latin root, then we just add
"-er"

This is also the cause of problems with "ible" and "able" endings (e.g. "responsible" and "habitable"), it just depends on whether the ancient Romans, with their laugh-a-minute complicated bunch of verb and noun endings, spelt words as "abilis" or "ibilis"

And ever had a problem with whether to spell a word as correspondENT or correspondANT? You just have to know that the former derives from respondo / -ere / -si / -sum to see at once thet it must end in ENT, unlike "important" which comes from porto / -are / -avi / -atum and hence logically ends in ANT.

Simple really.

crgwllms wrote:
> Don't know why it just occured to me, but WHY do we call
> someone who dances a dancER; who sings, a singER; who writes,
> a writER; ...etc....;

unless they write plays, in which case they're a playwright.

:-)

Cheers
Grant

PS. Apologies to all for slow response times lately. Informed Technology think the server may be bogged down with drive problems. Could take another few days to fix.

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Grant Malcolm wrote:
> PS. Apologies to all for slow response times lately. Informed
> Technology think the server may be bogged down with drive
> problems. Could take another few days to fix.
>

Which means either the rubber band has broken or the hamster is shagged out.

P.

Bravo !

Didn't expect such an explicit and educated explanation.


Now how am I going to continue my favourite rant about this silly, slippery, scintillating language?


crg

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