Human languages are complex and beautiful things. All linguistic systems are amazing products of the interaction which has taken place over many millennia between human societies and the human brain. But they are not necessarily particularly logical phenomena, nor are they necessarily particularly efficient in the way that they operate.
The technical term morpheme is used in linguistics to refer to the smaller grammatical elements which bond together to form whole words. In my previous paragraph we can point to the -s in languages and things, the -ing in amazing, the -ly in necessarily, and the -al in logical as being morphemes which provide us with some building blocks – grammatical elements – for the composition of words.
Consider the English morpheme -er. It can be used to produce comparative forms of adjectives, as with larger deriving from large, kinder from kind, newer from new. There are some irregularities in this system: the comparative form of bad is not badder but worse, where the -er morpheme is not employed at all, and the comparative form of good is not gooder but better.
The -er morpheme can also be used to form agentive nouns from verbs: adding -er to write gives us writer, to teach results in teacher, to walk gives us walker and so on with nouns which signify agents who perform the acts indicated by the verb. This -er ending is most often used with native Germanic words, while those of Latin origin often take the alternative -or spelling (actor, inventor, professor), but there are exceptions (bursar, liar).
The -er suffix when added to certain verbs can, as well, indicate repeated, small actions, as in flicker, glitter, quaver and stutter.
In addition, the -er suffix is used to create jocular or familiar forms from common or proper names. Examples are rugger from rugby, footer from football and soccer from Association Football. Many of these seem to have originated in Oxbridge colleges and the big public schools such as Rugby.
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A French connection in the American midwest
Finally, there is the usage of -er to indicate an inhabitant of a particular place, as in terms such as Londoner “a person from London” and islander “person from an island”.
So here we have what is seemingly a single morpheme which is being employed to perform five different grammatical functions. We can regard this multiplicity of uses of -er as being an efficient utilisation of linguistic resources, or, on the other hand, as illogical and potentially confusing.
Another very common multifunctional morpheme in English is the -s which does duty both as a marker of plurality or possession on nouns. For example, dogs can signify “more than one dog” or “belonging to the dog”; English orthography distinguishes between the two different senses by means of an apostrophe – dogs versus dog’s – but of course in our spoken language they are indistinguishable. The suffix -s can also function as a third-person verbal ending, as in “he dogs their footsteps”.
There are also prefixes that serve various uses, such as in- meaning “into” (inject) or “not” (incorrect).
We might wonder why languages tolerate such multifunctionality, but one possible reason which has been proposed is that this is because it is more efficient, allowing a single element to convey several different meanings or grammatical functions.
Morphology
The linguistic study of grammatical morphemes is known as morphology. Many other sciences such as biology and geology also have branches called morphology, which is not surprising given that the term simply refers to the study of the forms of things, from the Ancient Greek root morphí “form, shape” which we can also see in words such as metamorphosis “change in form”.
