Doing your own cognate analyses
By Jon Aske
Addendum (June 15, 2016) to Chapter 1 of:
Aske, Jon. in progress. Spanish-English Cognates: An Introduction to Spanish Linguistics. Open Access eBook (Open Textbook): CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US. Source: http://lrc.salemstate.edu/aske/cognates/
Copyright © 2016 by Jon Aske Creative Commons (Copyleft) License: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US) Source: http://lrc.salemstate.edu/aske/cognates/files/Doing_your_own_cognate_analyses.pdf
Introduction
Part II of this book provides a number of analyses of English-Spanish cognates. Part I, on the other hand, contains the background information, linguistic as well as historical, to be able to make such comparisons and to make sense of cognates in general, helping us explain why they exist, where they come from, why they are the way they are, and so on. The chapters in Part II go beyond just presenting cognates and it attempts to make connections between words, meanings, roots, history, culture, and so on, to make the analysis as rich and interesting as possible. Anyone can discover, research, and describe cognates in the manner exemplified in Part II of the book with the right kind of reference materials. All the reference materials that you need to get started are listed in the companion website. They include etymological dictionaries for English and Spanish, many of which can be readily found online, as well as other websites and book sources. As you read and assimilate the topics in Part I of the book, your cognate comparisons will become more and more sophisticated, for you will come to understand the apparent mysteries behind the vast majority of the cognates of Spanish and English. Most cognates are not ‘perfect’, in the sense traditionally given to the word cognate in language pedagogy, that is, cognates of the chocolate ~ chocolate or similar ~ similar variety, with identical form (spelling, if not pronunciation) and identical meaning. The vast majority of cognates, that is, words that derive from a common source (whether the word was borrowed or not), are not ‘perfect’. Most cognates differ somewhat in the form (letters, but also sounds) and they differ also to one extent or another on their meaning. The ability to make sense of those differences will remove the veil of mystery from such pairs of words, which will turn words that are considered to be (partially or completely) false friends into much more friendly words.
Analyzing a pair of cognates
To get started you should find a pair of words that are similar in their spelling as well as their meaning. You should probably avoid pairs of words that are obviously 100% cognates or close to it, of the chocolate ~ chocolate type. These words are not very interesting. Such words obviously involve very recent borrowings (from one another or from a third language) and thus time has not allowed their forms or their
Pg. 1 of 6 meanings to diverge. You should also avoid words whose forms are very different, such as Eng. building and Sp. edificio, or Eng. hand and Sp. mano. Even though their meanings are very similar or identical, it is very unlikely they have a common source. When you choose pairs of words to analyze you should be careful that the words are equivalent. Thus, cognates are typically from the same part of speech: both should be nouns, verbs, or adjectives, for example. Two words are unlikely to be cognates if they are from different parts of speech, though there are certainly exceptions to this rule. Thus, for instance, a word may have changed its part of speech at one point (from adjective to noun) or it may have developed an identical lexeme in another part of speech by what is known as conversion (cf. Chapter 5). Similarly, when looking for similarity you should be careful that the words are equivalent in their morphology. In Part I, Chapter 5, we see how words can often have prefixes and suffixes in addition to a root, for instance, and that these affixes can give rise to different words from the same root. Thus, when you choose your cognates you will want to make sure that you are comparing words that derive from the same original word, not just from the same root. Thus, you should not choose the words Sp. bruto and Eng. brutal, for the latter has a suffix (-al) that the former lacks. (Also, notice that Sp. bruto is a noun and Eng. brutal is an adjective.) It would be appropriate to pair Sp. bruto and Eng. brute, or Sp. brutal and Eng. brutal, since each of these pairs are true historical cognates, derived from the same actual word, namely Lat. brutus in the case of the first pair (Lat. brut+us) and brutalis in the case of the second (Lat. brut+al+is). Better yet, even though you can start with just one of these pairs, your analysis should include all of these words and other words derived from the same root brut-, showing their relationship to the root and to each other. In that case you will be analyzing a whole family of words derived from a single root in the source language, in this case the root Lat. brut-. At first you will be a little lost as to how to explain the differences, but soon you will get the hang of it as you learn more and more of the information in Part I of the book. You will soon learn important details such as that cognate Latinate verbs in English and Spanish will often have different endings due to the fact that Spanish borrowed Latin verbs from its infinitive form, e.g. Sp. ilustrar (form Lat. infinitive form illūstrāre), whereas English borrowed them from the participle form, cf. Eng. illustrate (from Lat. past participle form illūstrātus). (Note that in this case, as in all regular cases, the English and Spanish cognates share the stem illūstr-, formed from the prefix in- and the root -lūstr-.) You will also learn from this practice things such as that the fact that Sp. ilustrar only has one l whereas Eng. illustrate has (two like the Latin root) is due to changes in the spelling that were applied to borrowings from written Latin into Spanish, such as the simplification of some double consonants (but not all). Once you choose your words, you should ask yourself a number of questions, which you will attempt to answer. First of all, are these good cognates for students learning the language (either English or Spanish)? Where do they lie in the spectrum between perfect cognate (such as chocolate and similar) vs. false friend? Since the answer will probably be somewhere in the middle, you should ask yourself what makes them good or bad learning cognates? Is the form too different? Is the meaning too different? What are these differences? What do we know about the history of these words, including the original form and meaning, that can help explain the differences, as reflecting regular meaning or sound changes? Next, you will want to know what the origin and status of these words are in English and Spanish. How did these words enter each of these languages? Are they patrimonial in both languages, going back to Proto-Indo-European perhaps or to another very old source? Is only one of them patrimonial in its language? If one or both are borrowings, when was the borrowed and from what language? If it is a Latinate borrowing, was it borrowed from written Latin or from a language such as French? If the latter,
Pg. 2 of 6 was that word a patrimonial Latinate word that had changed a great deal in its form and/or meaning from the original form in classical Latin? It could be that one member of the cognate pair is a patrimonial or was borrowed from a patrimonial word and has thus changed a great deal, whereas the other member of the pair, in the other language, is a learned borrowing from written Latin and thus looks much more like the original word. You should also ask yourself if these words can be decomposed into parts, such as a root and affixes, that is, prefixes and suffixes (cf. Chapter 5)? Are there other words and, in particular cognates, that also contain that root? What is the relationship between these words and the original words you started from? For instance, is one a noun and the other one a verb? Is the noun derived from the verb, or vice versa? Can we tell? Finally, you will as want to ask yourself if there are any other interesting connections that you can you make between the two words. Is there any interesting thing about how one of the words is used in the language or about the word and some aspect of the history or culture of the language? Can you make any more connections that help us learn about the language, or about the culture or the history of the people who use that language? You are now ready to start doing your own analyses and comparisons. You should keep your eye open for pairs of words that are good candidates to be historical cognates. Find some that interest you and that you think have a lot of potential for interesting discoveries. If you still need help finding pairs of words to analyze. You yourself can become a full-fledged researcher in matters of the history of words and cognates and other aspects of language follow the following links. Much information about words and their histories is freely available online. To access a list of resources that you can use follow the following links:
Short list of main online resources: http://lrc.salemstate.edu/aske/cognates/reference.htm Annotated list of resources: http://lrc.salemstate.edu/aske/cognates/files/Annotated_Resources.pdf
Some advice for analyzing cognates
Sometimes you will want to analyze not two cognate words but rather a family of words that derive from the same root, typically in Latin, which have given us a number of cognate pairs. The family of words will share a common root but each member of the pair will have different composition of morphemes, that is, it will have other morphemes besides the root, such as prefixes and suffixes. For that, you will need to avail yourself of the information in Chapter 5, which deals with morphology, the analysis of word parts. If you are dealing with a Latin root and words derived from it, you will need to use Chapter 8 as a reference. That chapter contains all the information you may need to make sense of Latin and Greek loanwords, including the component morphemes and in particular all of the prefixes and suffixes as well as all of the major roots that appear in Latin and Greek loanwords in English and Spanish words. When analyzing the words derived from a particular root, you should be aware that the root morpheme might have had variants in the original language. Thus, for instance, the Latin ‘root’ cant-, as in the word canticle, sometimes had the form cent-, as in the word incentive. Also, you should be aware that when Latin derived words from a verb, it did not typically derive them from the root as it looked in the
Pg. 3 of 6 infinitive of the verb, but rather from the past participle form of the verb. In regular cases, the past participle of a verb contained the same root as the infinitive plus the past participle morpheme -t-, e.g. infinitive dīcĕre has the root dīc- (-ĕre is the third conjugation infinitival inflection ending), but the past participle was dĭctus. So the stem of the past participle (root plus derivational affix) is dĭct- (-us is the participle inflection ending). Notice that, by and large, the nouns and other words derived from this verb which gave us a family of words (and thus cognates in English and Spanish) are derived not from the root dīc- but from the stem dĭct-: e.g. Eng. diction, prediction, dictionary, etc. There are plenty of examples in which the two ‘roots’ look even more different that in this example, e.g. trah- and tract- (cf. Part II, Ch. 22), cēd- and cĕss- (cf. Part II, Ch. 15) and rĕg- and rēct- (cf. Part II, Ch. 25). Also, you will discover that a root may have changed along the way from the way it looked (spelling) or sounded originally. Sounds (and letter) may have been added or may have been dropped. The root may also look different whether a word comes from Latin directly as a loanword from the written language, or whether it comes to us through French where it may have been a patrimonial (and thus much changed) word. Thus, for example, if you analyze the words that derive from the Latin root can- (and its past- participle stem cant-), you will find that many of these words in English have the stem chant-, not cant-, as in the word chant or enchant (cf. their Spanish cognates canto and encantar). That is a reason for such changes and differences. In this case it is because these English words come from Parisian French (or its descendant, Standard French), where the letter c (sound [k]) changed to ch (sound [ʧ]) before the letter a (sound [a]), not from written Latin or from another Romance dialect where this change did not take place (such as Spanish, Italian, or Norman French).
Questions to ask yourself
Analyzing a root that is found in many cognates
Sometimes you want to analyze the words, and in particular the cognates, that are derived not from a word, but from a root. That is, you want to analyze a family of words in the source language and the cognates that it has spawned. The family of words in the source language will be based on a common root, but they will typically have different affixes or other morphemes (in the case of compounds).
If you are studying a family of cognates that contain the same root in the original language, what was the original root? Did that root have variants in the original language? Has that root suffered any changes throughout time in any one of the languages it has passed through before getting to English or Spanish? What words that are derived from that root have given us cognates in English and Spanish? In Chapter 8 (§8.10.4) you will find cognates for many of the major roots that have resulted in Spanish-English cognates. How are the words in the family of words derived from the same root related to each other? For example, are they derived from by means of prefixes and suffixes? Which ones? What is the most basic word from which all the others are derived? What form of that word is the actual source of the cognates? (For Latin and Greek derivational affixes, see Chapter 8, in particular §8.10.2.3 and §8.10.3.)
Pg. 4 of 6 Depending on the number of related pairs of cognates, you may then choose to analyze some of them in detail following the questions in the next section. Those questions are also valid if you are analyzing a pair of cognates in isolation.
Analyzing the origin (etymology) of a pair of cognates
When you analyze a pair of cognates you will want to discuss the origin (etymology) of the cognates and the way each of the two words has ‘travelled’ and changed to get to its present form. For most English words, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the final authority, but there are other more easily available dictionaries sources, many of them online, which can give us basic etymological information about a word. Sometimes the origin (etymology) of a word is uncertain. Finding out about the etymology (source and history) of Spanish words is typically more difficult, since there isn’t a good and complete etymological dictionary, but there are some sources that we can use, such as the Corominas etymological dictionary and even some online ones, such as wiktionary.com (cf. §4.10). Also, remember that if a word is patrimonial in Spanish it will typically have undergone the expected sound changes that Latin words suffered in the process of becoming words of Old Spanish and will thus look less (in the spelling) like the Latin source word (cf. Chapter 10). If a word has not undergone those changes and thus looks a great deal like the Latin word, you can be pretty sure that it is a learned word, not a patrimonial word.
For each member of the cognate pair, is the word patrimonial or is it a loan? Since patrimonial means that it has been in the language since origins of the language, typically a Latin word will only be patrimonial in Spanish.1 Oftentimes, however, the words will be loanwords in both languages, if borrowed from written Latin or any other language. I a word is not patrimonial, when did it enter in the language? Even for very early patrimonial loans, we would want to know when the word entered the language, if it is known, or at least when it was first attested in writing. I a word is not patrimonial, how did it enter in the language? For instance, was it a loanword from a Romance language (such as French or Italian) or did it come from written Latin? If it came from a Romance language, was it a patrimonial word in that language or was it a a learned word, that is, a loanword from written Latin? Alternatively, was it a loanword from another language (such as Arabic)? What do we know and what do not we know about the history of a word?
Changes in form and meaning
Now you will have to describe the form and meaning of each of the cognates, as well as the form and meaning of the original word they come from. You will want to mention all the relevant changes the word has undergone in each of the languages. For instance.
1 That is not always the case. Early loans from Latin into Germanic, such as the English words wall or wine, can be considered patrimonial in English, just like their cognates valla and vino are patrimonial in Spanish.
Pg. 5 of 6 How was the source word written (spelled) and pronounced? How is each of the cognates written and pronounced? Is there variation as to its pronunciation, such as dialectal variation? Are the words very similar as to their form (spelling and pronunciation) or are they different? How do they differ? Are the differences regular ones or are they unusual ones?2 Are they easily recognizable as cognates (for language learners, for instance) or are the differences too great? What are the parts (morphemes) of each of the original word and the cognate reflexes (descendants from the source word)? Is there anything else that is interesting regarding the form of the words? Regarding the meaning of the words, what was the meaning of the original source words and what are the meanings of the modern cognates? Has the meaning changed through the years? How? Are these words polysemous (have more than one sense or meaning)? Are the meanings of the cognates identical, only partially the same, or very different (false friends)? For instance, it could be that the main sense of the words the same but they differ in minor senses or even in collocations or idioms in which they are used. Is there anything else that is interesting regarding the meaning of the words? How do these cognates rate in usefulness for a person learning English or Spanish? Is there anything that can be done to make the two words be ‘better friends’ for a language learner?
2 If the English word has ph where Spanish has f, that is a regular correspondence. Another one is when English has double consonants, suchas tt in attack, whereas Spanish only has a single one, e.g. a t in atacar
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