Talk:-ist

Pertaining to people

Currently it says "Added to words to form nouns denoting:" and gives 4 examples of 3 different kinds of people. I do not believe this is an extensive enough definition and that we should supplement it. The reason being, I think -ist can also be used to create an adjective.

For example, "Christian" can be a noun meaning a person who is an adherent to Christianity, it can also be used as an adjective denoting things pertaining to it, such as a "Christian holiday". In the same way, we use -ist in a term like Buddhist to not only indicate a follower of Buddha as a noun, but as an adjective such as the alliterating "Buddhist beliefs" example

I am uncertain how to introduce this, but I feel it is important to relate other uses of this suffix to indicate creating an adjective from a noun in addition to creating a person noun from a subject noun. Dictabeard 00:52, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

In English, word sense isn't always inherent in the word itself, some words are homographs (e.g. homonyms) meaning that the sense of the word is based on its usage. When this is done with nouns, and the noun is used as an attribute of another noun, it's called an adjectival noun. The default sense is normally a noun, and it becomes adjectival only upon usage. So, looking strictly at a word (lemma) and the application of a morpheme (like an affix, e.g. suffix) we generally default to the noun sense.

This type of thing can be seen in many entries for a word (which is the lemma), with the entries detailing each sense of the word. e.g. "suffix", it has both the noun and verb senses. When used as a verb, it's a verb; otherwise, it's a noun. Buddhist is another example, on its own, it's a noun; when used as an attribute of another noun (person or thing) it is used as an adjective.

That doesn't make the description of -ist here wrong. And I don't think explaining word senses in the definition of a suffix is right (do this each for the hundreds of suffixes?)

--PeterRitchie (talk) 22:11, 28 August 2019 (UTC)

Added to words to form nouns

sexist, for example, is also an adjective --Backinstadiums (talk) 20:28, 10 July 2020 (UTC)