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?