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Doing Your Own Cognate Analyses 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.
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