bringer

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jk149
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bringer

Post by jk149 »

Hi,

As far as I know Lucifer means "Bringer of Light". Can "fer" be appended to a genitive noun to make "Bringer of ***"?

Thanks

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benissimus
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Post by benissimus »

-fer (sometimes -ferus) from fero, ferre is added to some nouns to create words meaning "carrier/bringer of ___". However, as you see with lucifer, it is not exactly added to the genitive (the genitive of lux is lucis) so it probably drops the S. I don't think it can be added to just any word though, so you should look a word up before you try to use it. Some examples from my dictionary (Oxford Latin) are caelifer and pomifer.

To see all of the word that end in -fer, here are the results from Perseus: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/re ... lang=greek
flebile nescio quid queritur lyra, flebile lingua murmurat exanimis, respondent flebile ripae

Moerus
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Post by Moerus »

Normaly -fer or -ger (from gerere, whats also in use) are put with the theme of the noun. But vowels in a word mostly undrgo changes because off the accent etc.
E. g.: If we take the theme from aquila, we have aquila. If we add -fer to it, we have aquilafer. But the a in an - open syllable in a word - in Latin will mostly change into i. So we have aquilifer.
Sometimes you can see the form before the evolution in inscriptionsn etc.
But in fact these are matters of historical grammar. And it's not as easy as it looks. For understanding this, you have to know many rules how vowels and consonants change from Indo-European into Latin and from archaic Latin into classical Latin, etc. So you will have a big book with all the changes.
But if you are interested in this matter, Palmer Latin Language gives a few of these rules.

Greetz,
Moerus.

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