| Affix function | number of borrowed affixes |
|---|---|
Information is taken from Matushansky (2023:4), quoting Witkowski (1981), and Hadzhieva et al. (2012). The borrowed suffix -ščik originated from the fusion of an adjectival ending -čij, which appeared extensively in Turkic noun agent borrowings, and a native nominalizer -ik. Eventually, -ščik became productive, replacing -čij. An alternative native etymology, which is widely accepted in traditional historical morphology of Russian, analyzes the affix as a fusion of the native adjectival affix -sk and the native nominalizer -ik. This is also how the form -ščik can be analyzed synchronically (Itkin 2007:2). Note that the form -čik is an allomorph of -ščik and -ščic is a feminine equivalent of -ščik (Matushansky 2023). We tentatively identify here proto Kipchak as a source language, the common ancestor of many central Asian Turkic languages, like Tatar. This agent noun suffix is frequently borrowed from Turkic languages across languages in Eurasia, including the AfBo language pairs Uzbek to Northern Tajik, Turkish to Iraqi Arabic, Turkic to Middle Mongolic, Azeri to Udi, and Turkish to Albanian. Hadzhieva et al. (2012) also discuss the borrowing of -čij into Old Church Slavonic.
1 agent noun derivation