Wurdahuzdą: Proto-Germanic dictionary — *-ārijazScott K. ShayWardja Presshttps://protogermanic.org/pgmc_ārijaz
Single-entry extract from the dictionary. Cross-references to other entries point to their identifiers in the full dictionary.
Cherchez la femme: Two Germanic suffixes, one etymologyPiotrGąsiorowskiFolia Linguistica5138–1125–1472017*-eh₂so-forms relational adjectives*-sōrderives feminine gender stems from roots*-āzios-forms relational adjectives to nouns (and rarely numerals)-āriusforms agent nouns from other nouns
suffixnounmasculineja-stemforms agent nouns and occupational nouns: ‘one associated with X’, ‘one who works with X’, ‘one who does X’ancestor of productive English -er in agent nounsThe accepted theory regarding the etymology of *-ārijaz maintains that it entered into Proto-Germanic as a borrowing from Latin -ārius via Proto-Italic *-āzios-, from Proto-Indo-European *-eh₂so-, which was further extended with the suffix *-(i)yó-s. This idea has remained popular because the formal and functional uses of the suffix are similar in both language families. The suffix was originally used to create occupational terms from verbs in Proto-Germanic. However, it eventually became productive in creating agentive terms in the language.Alternatively, Gąsiorowski 2017 derives *-ārijaz internally, relating it to the feminine occupational suffix *–astrijōn- (Modern English –ster; as in “spinster”). He believes it originated as an earlier alternation of a pre-Germanic collective complex *–sr–ih₂–ó– that was formed from the PIE feminine agentive base *‑sōr. This would make the masculine suffix originally native, though probably reinforced by Latin -ārius. The proposal is attractive, but it has not been generally accepted; the main difficulties are the uncertain evidence for the required *-sr- > *-zr- > -r- development and the indirect morphological and semantic pathways (building a masculine agent suffix from a feminine one seems unlikely at best).