English
Derivation of English verbs by the suffixes -en, -er, -le.
Examples:
-en: loos-en, lik-en, rough-en, short-en
-er: alt-er, glow-er, wond-er, count-er
-le: ming-le, hand-le.
They are all regular, but the types length-en, ord-er, lad-le, with n-n, r-r, l-l are relatively infrequent.
It is obvious that the 374 verbs ending in -en, -er, -le have many different structures, for instance all verbs in -er are not derived in the same way, whick means that there are not, strictly spoken, comparable morphologically and semantically. They are not derived in the same period of the English language. Many details can have influenced the choice between the three suffixes, but, in the end, the picture that you derive from the statistical facts is clear.
The diagram below here tells us, that there were found 5 verbs with an -l in the stem derivated by -le, 81 with -r in the stem derivated by -le, etc. Under Percentages we see, that the three groups with repetition, -l- + -le, -r- + -er and -n + -en, are rare, when compared to the average score of respectively -le, -er, -en. In principle, this fact does not tell us the reason for such a distribution, but it is logical to assume, that the non-repetition principle is part of the explanation.
Real values Percentages
-l‑ -r‑ ‑n- │ TOT -l‑ -r‑ -n- │ TOT
│ │
‑le 5 81 71 │ 157 ‑le 5,7 57,4 49,0 │ 42,0
‑er 68 26 72 │ 166 ‑er 77,0 18,4 49,6 │ 44,4
‑en 15 34 2 │ 51 ‑en 17,0 24,1 1,4 │ 13,7
───────────────────┼───── ───────────────────────┼────
TOT 88 141 145 │ 374 TOT 100. 100. 100. │100.