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Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2000 00:43:39 -0500 (EST)
From: Alfred M Kriman <akriman@darwin.helios.nd.edu>
Message-Id: <200003060543.AAA17699@darwin.helios.nd.edu>
To: classics@u.washington.edu
Subject: advis{e|o}r

It's been a busy few weeks, and I have a backlog of intended follow-ups;
please pardon the delay.

In a thread two weeks ago, J.W. Worthy ("still going by Webster's 1st")
asked

> Why are thesis advisers called advisors?

The agentive -or/-er is discussed in Edward Carney: _A Survey of English
Spelling_ (London & NYC: Routledge, 1994).  [Carney writes from a
British perspective with some comments on American differences, but in
any case the American/British divergence in -or/-our (mostly) mass nouns
does not intersect the set of words of agentive (and other mostly
countable) nouns taking the -or suffix.]

The relevant discussion is in section 5.5.5 (5.5 is "Homophonous
Affixes"), pp. 426-8, which makes clear that (as usual) there are
mostly trends and not firm rules:

| At first sight the difference between <-er> and <-or> in agentive
| nouns formed from verbs is one between native [Basic subsystem] words
| and [Latinate subsystem] words, but the distribution of the two forms
| proves to be more complicated and by no means fully regular.
....
| ... Purists do not like <-or> to be used with non-[Latinate subsystem]
| words even if they are [of the Romance subsystem].  Manchester
| University [Carney's home institution] had `advisors and tutors' up
| to 1954, but thereafter we have had `advisers and tutors'.

Loosely following Albrow [[1]], Carney refers to spelling subsystems
(which he writes §Basic, §Romance, §Latinate ...).  These do not
necessarily refer to etymology but to patterns of phonemic-orthographic
correspondences.  [E.g., Greek-derived _deacon_, like Germanic _beacon_
(*), is in the Basic subsystem.]

Five years or so ago, someone on the newsgroup alt.usage.english was
arguing that a new set of -or words was arising with -or semantically
distinct from -er/-or, words, but that's all I remember.  I think one
should at least consider the possibility that a semantic shading might
arise from the association of -or with Latinate words.

(*) This offers a new perspective on the famous Christmas cards that
the Quayle family sent out a few years back which mentioned a "beakon
of hope."

[[1]]
K. H. Albrow: _The English Writing System: Notes Towards A Description_
(London: Longman, 1972).

.