1419: practitioner but no practition Oct 30, 2018

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The suffix '-er' is very productive, meaning that it can lead to the creation of many news words. With words like 'practitioner' however, this is a sort of overproduction, because there is no 'practition'; there is the term 'practicer', but this is not quite the same as 'practitioner' really. In this case, 'practition' never existed, but 'practician' did. The problem here is that 'practician', which is a synonym of 'practitioner' as it refers to a person, is the origin, but it is not as simple as just adding the suffix in the ordinary way, as this would have been redundant. Rather, it is just a way in which language evolved over time, not always so sensibly.

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