cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/33025461

I’m doing some conlanging for a book and I’m having trouble finding the word for how we can take a verb, add -er at the end, and get a word for a person who does that thing. For example, a driver is someone who drives, a commander is someone who commands, a lawyer is someone who laws, and a finger is someone who fings. I am having trouble finding out how other languages noun their verbs in this way since I don’t know what this thing is called. Pls halp.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]M
    18·
    24 days ago

    The process is called “agentive nominalisation”, and the resulting noun an “agent noun”.

    From what I’ve seen most languages with the concept of agent noun do it like English does: start with the verb, remove any potential verb-exclusive affix, add a specific affix for agent nouns. That seems to hold true even for non-IE languages; see Old Tupi and Cebuano. However there are plenty twists you can add to that, for the sake of conlanging:

    • It doesn’t need to be after the root. A prefix, infix, or circumfix is fine too.
    • You could have multiple affixes instead, either for different semantic purposes or different phonetic environments. (I think Irish does the later.)
    • As typical for affixes they can also interact with the root; for example Old Tupi does this, if you plop that -sar (agent noun former) into the verb aûsub “to love”, the result is not *aûsubsar as you’d expect, but aûsupara (I think /bs/→/p/?)
    • Something akin to Arabic vowel alternations seems realistic IMO. Or even consonant mutations.
    • Instead of an affix, a separated word. It would be like saying “drive doer” in English, instead of “driver”.