If I farm, I'm a farmer. But if I guard, I'm a guard?

Question

One who farms is called a farmer.

One who waits is called a waiter.

One who dives is called a diver.

One who programs is called a programmer.

But one who guards is called a guard.

How did it come to be that this word dropped its -er ending for its noun, and are there other examples like it, sharing any commonalities?

Dictionary.com lists guarder as a noun, implying that it can be used instead of guard (and has an example sentence). But from my experience as a native American-English speaker, I can't recall it ever being used outside of poetic-style writing. Both dictionary.com and merriam-webster list guard as coming from the Old-French guarder, but I'm not sure why this word was special and dropped the -er.

Answer 1

You can't drop what you never had. Guard (noun) according to the Oxford English Dictionary comes from:

French garde, earlier also guarde (= Italian guarda, Spanish guarda) < Romance *guarda, < Old Germanic *wardâ.

The noun "guard" predates the verb in English. The verb to guard comes either from the noun or from the same French word the noun comes from. For some reason, as you note, there is a word guarder (formed from guard (verb) + er) that came into being after both the noun and verb forms of guard (which looks like it was a lot more popular some hundreds of years ago, but isn't really used now).

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Interestingly enough some of your examples aren't really examples. Farmer, for example, wasn't originally formed from the English words farm + er. The OED lists its etymology as:

Anglo-Norman fermer (Britton), French fermier < medieval Latin firmārius, < firma : see farm n.2 Now usually apprehended as agent-noun < farm v.2 + -er suffix1; some modern uses may be properly regarded as belonging to this formation and not to the older word.

_{In the early recorded forms the suffix -er has been replaced by -our, so that the word apparently corresponds to the synonymous medieval Latin firmātor, one who takes something on lease (Du Cange), agent-noun < firmāre in sense to contract for, become responsible for.}

Similarly, waiter wasn't formed in English originally according to the OED:

Originally < Anglo-Norman *waitour, Old French weitteor, gaiteor, agent-noun < weitier, gaitier wait v.1 In later use < wait v.1 + -er suffix1.

Answer 2

How about these, examples of professions that are both verb and noun where the verb expresses the work that the person typically does:

• guard
• coach
• cook
• guide
• host
• judge
• nurse
• pimp
• scout
• smith
• spy
• whore

As to the etymology of guard, Etymonline says the follwing:

from Middle French garde "guardian, warden, keeper; watching, keeping, custody," from Old French garder "to keep, maintain, preserve, protect"

So I presume garde first had an abstract meaning, more like "the phaenomenon of guarding", and as in "be on your guard! en garde!" or "my guard" denoting the body of men that guard me; and then it also came to be used for a person doing guarding later.

It appears that English only dropped the -e from the French profession after borrowing the noun. Since -e is unstressed and often mute or even silent in French, it isn't very surprising that it should have fallen off. In fact, there are countless nouns in older English that dropped an -e. Cf. the (probably anistorical) trope ye olde [noun].

Answer 3

With 'er' 'or' 'ist' suffixes you are usually dealing with an agent noun

From the Wikipedia link:

In linguistics, an agent noun (in Latin, nomen agentis) is a word that is derived from another word denoting an action, and that identifies an entity that does that action. For example, "driver" is an agent noun formed from the verb "drive".

So with agent nouns the verb comes first and the noun arises later. But in your example it's actually the other way round. The verb guard is derived from the noun. (Alternatively it was derived separately from the old French, but later chronologically, which would still explain why it doesn't fit the standard pattern.)

From the online etymology dictionary

guard (n.)

early 15c., "one who keeps watch, a body of soldiers," also "care, custody, guardianship," and the name of a part of a piece of armor, from Middle French garde "guardian, warden, keeper; watching, keeping, custody," from Old French garder "to keep, maintain, preserve, protect" (see guard (v.)).

guard (v.)

mid-15c., from guard (n.) or from Old French garder "to keep watch over, guard, protect, maintain, preserve" (corresponding to Old North French warder, see gu-), from Frankish *wardon, from Proto-Germanic *wardon "to guard" (from PIE root *wer- (3) "perceive, watch out for"). Italian guardare, Spanish guardar also are from Germanic. Related: Guarded; guarding.

Such a conversion process is seen by some linguists as a form of metonymy.

There's a very detailed article here from which I'll also lift their definition:

Metonymy is a cognitive process in which one conceptual entity" the vehicle" provides mental access to another conceptual entity" the target" within the same idealized cognitive models (Radden and Kovecses 1999, p.21).

In your case the noun denoting the agent of the action -- the guard -- is employed to denote the action itself. So 'guard' comes to mean what a guard does. A parallel example (from the above linked article) would be the noun father becoming the verb father as in 'he fathers several children'.

Answer 4

Many -er words for people do indeed derive from some other word such as a verb but many do not. The use of -r for people is extremely widespread in Indo-European languages but some of the most common clearly show that they are not just agents, but any kind of people, often not being derived from any other identifiable word: think of mother, father, brother, sister, daughter, with the first four of these at least clearly going back to Proto-Indo-European.

Across many languages we see a great variety in the vowel before the -r, which is why we have entrepreneur (from French), doctor (from Latin), scholar (from Latin). Other languages are even more varied. Consider mère (French for "mother"), sœur (French for "sister"), feirmeoir (Irish for "farmer"), maighstir (Gaelic for "master"). Doubtless there are other vowels used as well.