What is a cognate
What is a cognate? It is a building in South America. It is a pair of shoes. It is a word that looks like the word that means the same in another language. Another word for town in Spanish.
6 Answers
Strictly speaking, two (or more) words need only share a common origin in order to be cognates ("cognatus" in Latin -- "co" [together] and "natus" [birth]). They needn't be of different languages, sound/look particularly similar nor have the same meaning. The OED gives as an example "Eng. five, L. quinque, Gr. pente (but they have a Greek font), are cognate words, representing a primitive *pénke." (The asterisk prefixed to the last means that it is a reconstructed word [Proto-Indoeuropean, no doubt]). Although they all have the same meaning, I'm sure most would agree that they neither look nor sound particularly similar (unless you happen to be a historical linguist).
An example from Spanish: "correr"/"corriente"/"corrida" --- as the RAE points out, all "Del lat. curr?re" (meaning "to run"). An example from English: "fracture"/"frangible"/"fragile"/"fractal"/"fractious" all from [ultimately] the Latin verb frango, frangere, fregi, fractus [the "principal parts"] meaning "to break").
In a dual language forum, such as this, the term is used (more informally) to mean two English/Spanish words that look/sound quite similar and often (but not always) mean the same thing. If they appear/sound similar but have different meanings they are sometimes referred to as "false cognates" or (more informally) "false friends". Ironically, (well, I, at least, find it ironic) the more "academic"-sounding term is often inappropriate while the "informal" term is more accurate. For example: "constipado" in Spanish refers to a "head cold" (a blockage of the nasal passages) while "constipated" in English refers to a blockage somewhere quite different (our dictionaries suggest "estreñido(a)" as the Spanish equivalent [I simply avoid mentioning such conditions]). Nonetheless they are "real" cognates. However, over the centuries their meanings/uses have drifted apart (become more specialized) in the two languages.
The informal use (what will normally be encountered here refers, specifically, to words that look/sound like they should mean the same thing (and when their meanings differ, they are referred to as "false" friends).
Welcome to the forum. If you're looking for cognates here is a website full of them.
http://www.spanishstudies.com/spanish_cognates__letter_D.htm
Dos palabras de dos idiomas distintos que tienen un origen común de otro
idioma, y por eso, su pronunciación y forma ortográfica son parecidas.
Two words from two different languages that have a common origin in a different language, and therefore, their pronunciation and spelling are similar.
It is not any of these:
- It is a building in South America
- It is a pair of shoes
- Another word for town in Spanish
a cognate is a word that looks and souds the simaler in two differant counties an example is class in english is class and class in espaniol is clase
It is a word that looks and means the same in english and spanish, a near cognate is a word that looks similar and means the same thing!
