Question: Occupational nouns (butcher, sailor, musician, etc.) have various suffixes in English (er, or, ee, ant, etc.). Is there a set of rules to form occupational nouns from the verbs or their object (butchering, sailing, etc.)?
Explanation:
For example, what are the rules to go from this to this:
Leadership / Leading —-> Leader
…And not 'Leadian'
In the same way, when we 'invent' occupational nouns, how do we know that some are more correct than others? For instance, how do we know that 'low-self-esteemer' sounds more correct than 'low-self-esteemian'?
I have considered finding a regular expression part of speech tagger to give me a list of noun constructions. However, these do not have a separate category for 'occupation nouns'. More importantly still, they would not explain the rules for forming occupational nouns from verbs/objects, but only for identifying them.
So where are the rules for forming occupational nouns from verbs or objects?
Best Answer
An occupational noun derived from a verb usually ends in -er or -or and means "one who does [verb]". E.g.: jumper, eater, runner, walker, sailor etc.
An occupational noun that is derived from another noun will usually end in -ian. For example, librarian is derived from the noun library; there is no verb to library.
You could say that occupational nouns that end in -ian mean something like "one who works at/for/with [noun]". For example, a musician is "one who works with music" (not "one who musics" because there is no verb to music).
There are exceptions, but I think this is a good rule of thumb.