(no subject)

[highlyeccentric]

Y'know what I decided the other day? 'Lesbian' is not a noun. Or was not, originally. It is an adjective which has come to be used so often in a substantive role that it is now commonly identified as a noun.

-ian is an adjectival ending, like -ic. I've never seen -ic used as a suffix on a substantive adjective, however: instead, we use the noun suffix -ist. German is an ethnic group; 'germanic' is the adjective used for things relating to that group, as in 'germanic languages'; a 'germanist' studies germanic things. At one stage, the adjective 'sapphic' had the corresponding nouns 'sapphist' and 'sapphism'. The adjective 'lesbian', however, can cover for both of these things.

That got me thinking about other -ian words. Consider the difference between 'Australian' and 'English'. Things are 'Australian', and you can meet 'an Australian'. But meet someone who IS English, and they are an Englishman/woman. Englishman(/woman) is a compound formed from both the adjective and the noun; 'Australian' is an adjective which can take a substantive role.

Now, back to lesbian. The OED tells me that the adjective 'lesbian' predates the noun by about thirty years. The duplication happens because English is a handy flexible language which allows us to pick up certain adjectives and use them substantively. After frequent substantive use, they become settled as nouns and the substantive use can outstrip the adjectival.
(Oddly, the word 'lesbianism' occurs in the OED twenty years earlier than the word 'lesbian'. Are isms built on adjectives or nouns? I do not know.)

On the other hand, the word 'Librarian' appears to have gone straight from the latin adj 'librarius' (is that an adjective? i think it is.) 'concerned with books', to noun form. Which makes me sad, not only because it sort of shoots down my substantive adjective theory, but also because I would like to use the word 'librarian' to refer to books and book-collections...

AAAND I am procrastinating wildly about now :D

Comments

this all well and good but

[daiskmeliadorn.livejournal.com]

do i say, "i'm lesbian" or "i'm a lesbian"??

Re: this all well and good but

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

EITHER. That's the awesomeness :D.