Here’s what I was thinking when we have a job for example, we often will have different forms for whether a female or male is doing it.
Example:
Waiter / Waitress
Actor / Actress
Aviator / Aviatrix
But in each of those examples the base word is still the same. Wait is the base word or Act is the base word and we add a suffix depending on whether it’s male or female.
I was wondering are there words that describe a male or female version but do not share a base word.
Again actor and actress both share the base word ACT
I’ll make up an example:
Let’s say somone hammers rocks and we call it a hammeror if it was a male but a acmess if it was a woman.
You see the female version in my made up example has nothing in common with the male version which takes the form from the base word hammer.
I hope I’m explaining this right.
Are there examples of this in real life? I’m not sure I explained this clearly enough so I’ll post it and see who answers and if it’s not clear, I’ll try to make it so.
Boy and girl are not occupations. Also, the earliest meaning of the latter was “a child or young person of either sex,” as one may discover by checking the Oxford English Dictionary.
That’s a good one, as it is indeed an occupation, even though one carried on by only one person in a particular realm. Another pair is earl/countess, since there are no counts in English-speaking countries.
You mean the one where it states that the comparison for different jobs is an example?
The title is “Total [sic] Different Base Words To Represent A Male -vs-Female”–says nothing about it being a job. Indeed, it says nothing about being human. Which leaves us open to