word choice - Why do we say 'commentator' instead of 'commenter'?

Another thread addresses the Englishness of the words. My question is different and a lot more convoluted: I hope I can make it plain and simple.

I. There are straightforward nouns of action and agency with roots in English verbs: procrastinator, loafer, snoozer. And other nouns that arise from augmented (let's say) forms of the verb. 'Commentator' is one such word: there's no verb 'commentate.' ¹

'Orientation' meaning 'guidance' or 'adjustment' ("student-orientation week") is another, though hugely more vexed because there actually is a verb 'orientate' meaning to face eastward (both transitively and intrans). But I convolute.

II. Not long ago, we had a thread about meter and foot in prose: iambic, trochaic, and who knows what else that I've forgotten since college. Arguably, as speakers and writers, we seem unconsciously to choose the iambic (say) over boring spondaic. As listeners, we perhaps naturally find the iambic most pleasant and (umm...) euphonious.

III. Finally, the question. Let's suppose that we do in truth prefer rhythm that we can grab, that we can lean on and stand on.

Do we then invent and manufacture made-up verbs just so as to give us corresponding made-up nouns that feel better to speak and write? That sound better to our ears? 'Commentator' sounds a lot better than 'commenter'. 'Orientator' is somehow easier to say than 'orienter'.

Not to go all Chomskian on y'all, but is there an impulsive, inborn, irresistible way to speak?

A natural way of locution? ²

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¹ Not by our lights, anyway. Right? Right?
² Or am I merely dredging up fragments of Aristotle from dim recall?

Answer

The English word commentator comes directly from Medieval Latin commentator. However, this Latin ancestor is labelled as rare and some dictionaries don't have it.

Classical Latin does not use commentator but instead prefers commentor.

Both are formed after the verb commentārī, but one can see that by adding the standard Latin agent noun suffix ("-or") to the verb yields "commentor".

Please note that the Latin verb commentārī had a much broader meaning. It can be used as any of the followings: "to consider thoroughly [thoughts]", "to prepare [exposé]"; "to invent", "to compose", "to write [literary works]".

For instance, "commentarius" has the meaning of "memorandum , notebook". Remember for instance the original Latin title "Commentarii de Bello Gallico" of Julius Caesar's ("Commentaries on the Gallic War"): these are actually not comments but a notebook, a relation (a title designed to be neutral but with an agenda as is well known).

I'm not too sure why Medieval Latin "commentator" came to supplement Classical Latin "commentor" but I speculate that this is related to the gradual loss of meaning as "to invent" and to the consequent specialisation as "to expound" in which case "commentator" would be formed after "commentarius" the noun (this Julian "Commentarii" really looked like comments).

So we have "commentary" and "comment" (just as we have documentary and document).

Looking up both words in the Century Dictionary shows the nuance:

• A commentator "makes comments or critical or expository notes upon a book or other writing".


• A commenter "makes remarks about actions, opinions, etc.".

There's a whiff of scholarship in the commentator that is absent from the mere commenter.

I don't deny that musicality or morphological consistency have a role to play in our vocabulary. However, and this is particularly true of English, I would argue that when several words with close signification are in competition, they tend to specialise and contribute to the language's richness.

In that particular case the reason why we might be more attracted to the variant "commentator" is possibly because of its perceived higher quality standard.

Nevertheless, the word "commenter", having a long history of its own also has its dedicated niche where it is preferably used.

A significant proportion of the COCA corpus entries I found had "commenter" associated with "anonymous" or "typical": sounds better than "anonymous commentator" this time.