Is it just a coincidence, or was there a reason why they ended in '-er'? I know that all of them derive from PIE, where they also ended in '-er'.
Also, is this '-er' the same '-er' particle, as in 'fighter', 'liar', 'runner', etc.?
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I already answerred it, so this is a copy of my previous answer:
There was the agent suffix -ter- of PIE. It was used for creation of terms for relatives and for creation of agent nouns.
Suffix -ter- was used to create a noun for person whose function or profession was to perform the action (irrespective whether he actually did it) while the o-grade of it -tor- was used to denote a person who just did the action. The combination of suffixes -a̯-ter- was used for some relatives.
Thus the term for daughter in PIE was dhuga̯tēr.
The same suffix in zero-grade, "-tr-" in combination with inanimate ending "-om" was used for creating words for tools, such as a̯ero̯trom "plow", u̯estrom "wear", tere̯trom "auger", costrom "knife".
By the way, of course, the PIE superlative -ter-os was also another use of the same suffix. Thus "gela̯teros" would mean "more joyful". The word "enter" (from Latin intra-) is another example of use of this suffix with adverbs: e̯en "in" + "-ter-om" -> e̯enterom "intestines", of which locative case is e̯enteri "inside".
The English suffex -er does not have anything in connection, it is believed to be borrowed from Latin -arius.
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I found this in Google Books, where the author claims that kinship suffix *-ter cannot be reliably connected to the agent suffix *-ter. So is it accepted by linguistics that they are the same *-ter? – sashoalm Jan 10 '14 at 9:13
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Proto-Indo-European is a field where hardly anything is universally "accepted by linguistics". Everything is open for informed discussion. – fdb Jan 10 '14 at 10:44
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@sashoalm what do you mean under "connected"? Common etymological origin or something else? – Anixx Jan 10 '14 at 17:34
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I meant common etymological origin, yes. That was the word used in the text from Google Books, actually. Btw, does Latin '-tor' as in protector come for PIE *-ter? Also in Slavic there is an agent suffix that ends in -ar. – sashoalm Jan 10 '14 at 17:42
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@sashoalm yes, Latin -tor is exactly the same suffix (although in "protector" it is fused with the stem "protect"). The Slavic -ar is a different suffix, related to English -er and thought to be borrowed from Latin -arius at very early times. The etymology or PIE "-ter-" is unknown. – Anixx Jan 10 '14 at 18:25
The Indo-European words for “father, mother, sister, brother” are all stems in –r, which appears as -ṛ, -er, -ēr, -ōr in different forms of these words.
The English agent suffix –er, as in "fighter", goes back to a proto-Germanic *-ārijaz, which is widely held to be ancient borrowing from the Latin suffix –ārius.
There is no connection between these.
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1"are all stems in –r" - What does this mean? I couldn't figure it out. Is this a class/type of words in PIE? – sashoalm Jan 9 '14 at 20:47
This -er is no way a particle, it is probably a very ancient Indo-European suffix of unknown meaning, not connected with the modern English agent -er suffix. These words belong to the so called athematic r-stem nouns (nouns with stems ending not in a vowel, but in -r-). Not only kinship terms belonged to that noun class, the word "water" also belongs to it (Hittite 'watar', 15th century BC).
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1Also "daiver" (brother in law), which is preserved in some Slavic languages, but not English. – sashoalm Jan 9 '14 at 20:49
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@sashoalm - You are absolutely right. Also, the Russian "свёкор" (father-in-law), which is cognate with the Latin "socer", probably file here. – Yellow Sky Jan 9 '14 at 21:34
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And many more, e.g. Sanskrit naptar- "grandson" (from the same root as Latin nepos, but a different stem formation). – fdb Jan 10 '14 at 0:04
