Should we coin a new word: Homocognate?
A recent question included the Spanish word "comestibles" which I was unfamiliar with, so I looked it up and was surprised when the SD dictionary gave me a definition of the English word "comestibles" of which I was also unfamiliar. As neither word appears borrowed from the other language, and both hold the same meaning, it is safe to assume they are cognates (words sharing a common etymology). As such, "comestibles" joins the ranks of other words such as "normal" and "literal" that are both cognates and homographs (words spelt the same).
Having studied English and linguistics, and now Spanish, I was curious as to what these words from different languages that share etymology, meaning, and spelling, might be called, but a short google search has yielded no result. Does any such term exist? If not, we could always coin one: Exact cognate, homographic cognate, or homocognate seem like options.
5 Answers
I can’t find any agreement on a term. I lean to identical cognate.
http://www.realfastspanish.com/vocabulary/spanish-cognates
In this article, I have defined perfect cognates as words that are spelt exactly the same in Spanish and English except for maybe an accent over one letter and they mean the same thing in both languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orthographically_identical_words_in_English_and_Spanish
List of orthographically identical words in English and Spanish
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The following is a list of words that occur in both Modern English and Modern Spanish, but which arepronounced differently, and may have different meanings in each language.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/333037.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
1464 Identical Cognates in English and Spanish
In my classes, I have invented the terms "exact cognate" like "motor" or "doctor" where the words are exactly alike; "close" cognate, like "familia" "programa" and others. Then we have the "distant" cognates like, "trabajo" for "travail or work."
As I have never found any sources that talk about these, I decided to invent them. They work well in my classes.
There are around 15,000 cognates between Spanish and English. Most of these are close or distant.
I forgot one. "deceptive or false cognates." Below is an example of these.
Ésto es lo que en mi búsqueda en la red ha aparecido en primer lugar, espero que te sirva.
The second search.
But I Like you , have not found what you was searching for
OK... I'm with bosquederoble on this one.
I believe that some linguists use the expression true cognates for the phenomenon that you describe. This is unfortunate, because others use true cognates to contrast with false cognates... that is, they use true cognates to mean cognates.
So, given all that, here someone suggests identical cognates or fully true cognates to represent your phenomenon:
there is a whole range of cognates between true and false.
Very few are identical (fully true)
Sadly, still others use cognates to mean what you mean by homocoognate, as here:
Cognates are words which have the same spelling and
meaning in two languages (e.g., animal in English and
Spanish).
Anyway, best of luck with exact cognate, homographic cognate, or homocognate. Whichever you choose to use, you'll end up having to explain what you mean by it.
Rather than edit my post I'll put an alternative option here. After considering Bosque's input on identical cognates it was immediately obvious that they could not be truly identical because pronunciation would nearly always differ between languages. But this made me think that pronunciation would be the only difference between the words.
So, perhaps I am looking for a term that doesn't exist because in effect these words that have the same spelling, the same etymology, and the same meaning, are just the same words. The only feature defining the word as belonging to one language over the other being the pronunciation. Just a thought.
