vocabulary
The original author of the manuscript ___ unknown.
stays/remains
Are both of these words ok to use in this sentence? Is there a slight difference in meaning? Which one is more native, better in your opinion?
P.S. It's a question from my exam. And many students argue about the correct answer. We need help of our English friends. Thanks!)
This isn't an exhaustive list, but let me give it the old college try. In english, the following suffixes are considered adjective-forming:
Relational Family
All the members of this family mean of or pertaining to. Some have a different scope than others.
Of Similar Form To, But Not the Same As
Others
I would characterize the use of "recites" in the linked post as technically not incorrect, but very unnatural and antiquated.
That said, definition 4b from the OED does not support their claim that their use is in keeping with English usage of these words -- outside of legal contexts, it is not. That definition supports examples like "I recite this notice," but being able to use "recite" as a transitive verb does not make it acceptable in this context. "Read" may have a similar meaning to recite in contexts like "I read this notice," but unlike "recite", "read" is acceptable as an unaccusative verb. Many verbs, like "read", can be used as intransitives with the patient as the subject, but this is not typically the case for "recite," at least not in modern non-technical usage. The examples under definition 4b confirm this: they are examples in which an agent (in this case, a person) recites a text, not in which that text recites its contents.
However, there are indeed attested examples in the OED (which I also have access to) of "recite" being used as they claim it's used.
The relevant definition here is definition 1, which describes a definition of "recite" specific to the legal field.
The "also with clause as object" is what would describe the linked author's post, as that's clearly how they're using "recites" there. However, you'll notice that this definition specifies the Law domain, and that the examples from the 20th century are all from law reports and journals -- this is because using "recite" in this manner is really only accepted in the legal field, where language change occurs very differently and much more slowly than it does in the language used elsewhere (such as on Stack Exchange).
This is no doubt why the original post sounds so utterly wrong to some native English speakers -- because this usage is antiquated and unnatural outside of a very specific legal register (one most of us are not familiar with) and was used outside of the social context in which that register is appropriate.
This is why it is important for learners to pay attention to the sources of quotes like these when they're included in dictionaries, particularly in dictionaries like the OED, in which the examples can come from a wide variety of sources written in a huge variety of different registers. Using the right register for the context is a huge part of making one's speech sound natural, and even if using "recites" here is technically grammatical, that doesn't make it sound any less unnatural to native speakers (particularly when such an easy, more suitable alternative for a non-legal register exists in "read").
Best Answer
There's a (fairly weak) tendency for remain to be used of states, conditions, whereas stay is more likely when referring to locations, attitudes.
Perhaps linked to that, stay tends to be used where the subject is in control of the attribute/situation continuing without change. Thus,...
...where I think #1 is more likely if the speaker would have liked to marry earlier (but circumstances didn't work out as he might have hoped). And #2 is more likely if the speaker deliberately chose to enjoy his 20s as a footloose and free bachelor.
For both those reasons, it's better to say the author remains unknown in OP's context. To me, the author stays unknown suggests the author is taking active steps to avoid detection.
For what it's worth, here are a few more contexts where the two words aren't likely to be thought of as "interchangeable". But I wouldn't like to say how much they reflect underlying principles, as opposed to randomly-established idiomatic preference...