Words ending in -cial/tial

Question

Can anyone please highlight the process behind the formation of words ending in -cial/-tial?

For instance,

finance is the root for financial

but,

different is the root for differential

substance is the root for substantial

Is there some general rule to apply?

What about words like partial and managerial where the root is not changed by adding the -ial suffix? — cobaltduck, Mar 09 '16 at 16:24
@cobaltduck true, hadn't thought of those... I guess my question relates more to the -cial / -tial terminations. Fixed the question. — Joum, Mar 09 '16 at 16:28
Differential is formed from different, not from difference. — Anonym, Mar 09 '16 at 16:30
There's a "sort of rule": Rule: Use -cial after a vowel, like after the vowel 'o' in social, 'e' in special, 'i' in beneficial. Use -tial after a consonant, especially, after 'n' in substantial, essential, and 'r' in parcial. But the final spelling mistake there is somewhat ironic, given the site is called *howtospell.co.uk* — FumbleFingers, Mar 09 '16 at 16:31
I'm feeling quite stupid now, because I couldn't find the question marked as duplicate before asking this. — Joum, Mar 09 '16 at 16:36
@Joum: I didn't find it either. But it's amusing to note that on the original, sumelic cited the same source as my comment above (*silently* correcting the parcial spelling mistake! :) — FumbleFingers, Mar 09 '16 at 17:34
@FumbleFingers: actually, it seems the page I linked to does not have the mistake, while the one you linked to does. Mysterious! Perhaps one of the pages was edited at some point. — herisson, Mar 09 '16 at 17:48
@sumelic: How odd. Actually, they seem to be two different sites, so it's tempting to suppose the "correct" one plagiarized and corrected the original. — FumbleFingers, Mar 09 '16 at 17:55
@Joum I oversimplified in my comment. The word substance is from Latin substantia, whence substantial, The word difference is from Latin differentia, whence differential. As you can see, the change is actually not from -c- to -t-, but vice-versa; all these words came to us through Old French, which has a habit of changing things in ways that make very little sense to speakers of Modern English. — Anonym, Mar 09 '16 at 18:14
@FumbleFingers: they're different sites, but they seem to be run by the same person, so I wouldn't call it plagiarism. — herisson, Mar 09 '16 at 19:41

Words ending in -cial/tial

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