Cognate

File:Etymological relations tree.svg

Diagram showing relationships between etymologically related words

In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language.

Because language change can have radical effects on both the sound and the meaning of a word, cognates may not be obvious, and it often takes rigorous study of historical sources and the application of the comparative method to establish whether lexemes are cognate. It can also happen that words which appear similar, or identical, in different languages, are not cognate.

Cognates are distinguished from loanwords, where a word has been borrowed from another language.

Name

The English term cognate derives from Latin Template:Wikt-lang, meaning "blood relative".

Examples

For an example, cognates with the English word night can be found in most major Indo-European languages, including German , Swedish , Polish , Russian Template:Tlit, Lithuanian , Welsh , Greek Template:Tlit, Sanskrit Template:Tlit, Albanian , Latin (gen. sg. ), Italian , French , and Portuguese . These all mean 'night', and derive from the Proto-Indo-European Template:Wikt-lang with the same meaning. The Indo-European languages have hundreds of such cognate sets, though few of them are as neat as this.

The Arabic Template:Tlit, the Hebrew Template:Tlit, the Assyrian Neo-Aramaic Template:Tlit and Amharic Template:Tlit 'peace' are cognates, derived from the Proto-Semitic *šalām- 'peace'.

The Paraguayan Guarani , the Eastern Bolivian Guarani , the Cocama and Omagua , and the Sirionó are cognates, derived from the Old Tupi 'butterfly', maintaining their original meaning in these Tupi languages. Brazilian Portuguese (flock of butterflies in flight) is a borrowing rather than a cognate of the other words.

Characteristics

Cognates need not have the same meaning, as they may have undergone semantic change as the languages developed independently. For example English starve and Dutch Template:Wikt-lang 'to die' or German Template:Wikt-lang 'to die' all descend from the same Proto-Germanic verb, Template:Wikt-lang 'to die'.

Cognates also do not need to look or sound similar: English father, French Template:Wikt-lang, and Armenian Template:Wikt-lang (Template:Tlit) all descend directly from Proto-Indo-European . An extreme case is Armenian Template:Wikt-lang (Template:Tlit) and English two, which descend from Proto-Indo-European Template:Wikt-lang; the sound change *dw > erk in Armenian is regular.

Paradigms of conjugations or declensions, the correspondence of which cannot be generally due to chance, have often been used in cognacy assessment. However, beyond paradigms, morphosyntax is often excluded in the assessment of cognacy between words, mainly because structures are usually seen as more subject to borrowing. Still, very complex, non-trivial morphosyntactic structures can rarely take precedence over phonetic shapes to indicate cognates. For instance, Tangut, the language of the Xixia Empire, and one Horpa language spoken today in Sichuan, Geshiza, both display a verbal alternation indicating tense, obeying the same morphosyntactic collocational restrictions. Even without regular phonetic correspondences between the stems of the two languages, the cognatic structures indicate secondary cognacy for the stems.

False cognates

False cognates are pairs of words that appear to have a common origin, but which in fact do not. For example, Latin and German both mean 'to have' and are phonetically similar. However, the words evolved from different Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots: , like English have, comes from PIE Template:Wikt-lang 'to grasp', and has the Latin cognate 'to seize, grasp, capture'. , on the other hand, is from PIE 'to give, to receive', and hence cognate with English give and German .

Likewise, English much and Spanish look similar and have a similar meaning, but are not cognates: much is from Proto-Germanic Template:Wikt-lang < PIE Template:Wikt-lang and is from Latin < PIE Template:Wikt-lang. A true cognate of much is the archaic Spanish 'big'.

Distinctions

Cognates are distinguished from other kinds of relationships.

• Loanwords are words borrowed from one language into another; for example, English beef is borrowed from Old French ('ox’). Although they are part of a single etymological stemma, they are not cognates.
• Doublets are pairs of words in the same language which are derived from a single etymon, which may have similar but distinct meanings and uses. Often, one is a loanword and the other is the native form, or they have developed in different dialects and then found themselves together in a modern standard language. For example, Old French is cognate with English cow, so English cow and beef are doublets.
• Translations, or semantic equivalents, are words in two different languages that have similar or practically identical meanings. They may be cognate, but usually they are not. For example, the German equivalent of the English word cow is , which is also cognate, but the French equivalent is , which is unrelated.

Related terms

Etymon (ancestor word) and descendant words

An etymon, or ancestor word, is the ultimate source word from which one or more cognates derive. In other words, it is the source of related words in different languages. For example, the etymon of both Welsh and Irish is the Proto-Celtic (all meaning horse).

Descendants are words inherited across a language barrier, coming from a particular etymon in an ancestor language. For example, Russian and Polish are both descendants of Proto-Slavic ('sea').

Root and derivatives

A root is the source of related words within a single language (no language barrier is crossed).

Similar to the distinction between etymon and root, a nuanced distinction can sometimes be made between a descendant and a derivative.

A derivative is one of the words which have their source in a root word, and were at some time created from the root word using morphological constructs such as suffixes, prefixes, and slight changes to the vowels or to the consonants of the root word. For example unhappy, happily, and unhappily are all derivatives of the root word happy.

The terms root and derivative are used in the analysis of morphological derivation within a language in studies that are not concerned with historical linguistics and that do not cross the language barrier.

See also

• Homology (biology)
• Indo-European vocabulary
• False friend
• False etymology
• Folk etymology
• Word family