Starting with something I do know:
A collateral adjective is an adjective that is related to a particular noun in meaning but not in derivation.
Examples:)
the way dog is related to canine, night to nocturnal, forest to sylvan, star to sidereal, etc.
When it comes to nouns (such as “kegler”), a similar term such as collateral noun does not exist. So what are they called?
Well as they’re both nouns they’re synonyms. Are you asking is there a word for synonym that applies only to nouns?
Thanks for the replies.
I guess they have no special category.
Crossword puzzle nouns?
It’s more than just that.
A bowler is someone who bowls. A kegler is someone who… kegles? No, it’s also someone who bowls, but you wouldn’t have guessed that if you weren’t already familiar with the word.
Same sort of thing for “cager” for someone who plays basketball, or “angler” for someone who fishes. They’re nouns for someone who does a particular thing, but they bear no apparent relation to the verb for the activity, when there’s a reasonable alternative noun that does. (Am I catching your drift, OP?)
Sometimes the term for a profession dies out because the profession itself falls by the wayside, while terms for the objects those professionals made or processed continue to be current. Cooper for barrel-maker and milliner for hat-maker are two that come to mind.
A lot of these in English are due to influence from Latin. Generally, simple nouns tend to be of Germanic origin (either native English or Norse/Viking loanwords), while adjectives often come from Latin (and sometimes Greek). Sometimes these are called adjective doublets.
E.g.
night/nocturnal
cat/feline
brother/fraternal
cow/bovine, beef
worm/vermian
ice/glacial
moon/lunar
earth/terrestrial,terran
love/amorous
work/laborious
hand/manual
heart/cardiac
lung/pulmonary
kidney/renal
tooth/dental
blood/sanguine
finger/digital (yes, “digital” computers are called that because they track data in an analogous way to counting fingers, each of which can be up or down but not in-between)
head/capital
brain/cerebral
ant/formic
war/bellicose
house/domestic
doom/judgmental
steersman/gubernatorial(Latin),cybernetic(Greek) (“cyberspace” is a computer network that one can navigate around, and governors metaphorically steer the government).
Thanks, **robert_columbia **.
It’s interesting that in some of the examples you gave, there are adjectives based directly on the noun that have different meanings from the adjective doublets:
nightly (every night) vs. nocturnal (at night)
wormy (infested with worms) vs. vermian (of the worm family)
toothy (full of teeth) vs. dental (related to teeth)
lovely vs. amorous
handy vs. manual
In other cases, adjectives based directly on the noun have meanings similar or identical to the adjective doublets:
brotherly/fraternal
icy/glacial
earthly/terrestrial
bloody/sanguine
brainy/cerebral
warlike/bellicose
Even in these cases, there are usages where the meanings are quite different. “Icy” can mean a cold demeanor, while “glacial” can mean a slow pace. “Bloody” can be a mild curse word, while “sanguine” can mean “optimistic.” “Bloody” can also mean"having blood all over the place," e.g. “bloody crime scene.” No one would say, “sanguine crime scene,” at least not to mean the same thing.
I guess most of these differences are due to semantic drift - words changing meaning or picking up new meanings over time.
Yep, I think you’re right. For some, there has been very little drift. For others, the new meanings are only metaphorically related to the old. If you are having trouble turning hard to port in your yacht, you could call a cybernetic engineer who can identify your helm and rudder skill and equipment gaps. Language is that way sometimes. He doesn’t deal with computers, but he’s still a cybernetic expert.
One example of a non-Latin doublet in English is shirt (from native Anglo-Saxon/Old English) and skirt (Viking/Old Norse). Originally, they just meant the same thing, and are obviously derived from the same Proto-Germanic source from 500 BC or whenever. Since English speakers didn’t really need two very close words that meant the same thing, they changed the meaning of one of the words to something not quite the same. So a skirt, essentially, became a shirt that you wore on your legs.