On one hand you have pharmacist, dentist, anethsacist, psychiatrist, etc. One the other you have cardiologist, urologist, neurologist, etc.
Is there a rule for this, or just what sounds better? Could you have a neuralist or a psyciatrologist?
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There is no steadfast rule for this. The common thread here is simply how old the origin of the word is dictated the preference at the time.
To start, the earliest terms had the suffix -er. Examples like astronomer still survive.
Newer terms from the 1800s started adding -ist which is a suffix of latin origin. This was a result of the post-enlightenment era wanting to bring some ancient prestige back.
Then in roughly the same time period you have others with a preference for Greek over Latin. So they started using -logy and -ology.
Eventually some crossing between the two came the amalgam of -ologist, which is the combination of two suffixes from different languages.
Personally I like -er but basically more “prestigious sounding” suffixes were preferred because they sounded cool to science guys 200 years ago.
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