Cognate
Categories: Historical linguistics
Cognates are words that have a common origin.
Examples of cognates are the words night (English), Nacht (German), nicht (Scots), noc (Czech), nox (Latin), nakti- (Sanskrit), and naktis (Lithuanian), all meaning night and all deriving from a common Indo-European origin. Another Indo-European example is star (English), str (Sanskrit), star (Sinhala), aster (Greek), stella (Latin), stairno (Gothic), Stern (German), stjärna (Swedish), setare (Persian), steren (Cornish), ster (Afrikaans), estel (Catalan), and estêre (Kurdish).
Hebrew shalom and Arabic salaam are also cognates deriving from a common Semitic root.
Cognates can exist within the same language. For example, English ward and guard are cognate as are shirt and skirt. In some cases, one of the cognate pairs has an ultimate source in another language related to English, while the other one is native; in others both come from other languages, often the same one but at different times.
Cognates may often be less easily recognised than the above examples and authorities sometimes differ in their interpretations of the evidence. The English word milk is clearly a cognate of German Milch and of Russian moloko. On the other hand, French lait and Spanish leche (both meaning "milk") are less obviously cognates of Greek galaktos (genitive form of gala, milk).
Cognates may not have the same meaning: dish (English) and Tisch ("table", German), or starve (English) and sterben ("die", German), or head (English) and chef ("chief, head", French), serve as examples as to how cognate terms may diverge in meaning as languages develop separately.
In addition to having separate meanings, cognates through processes of linguistic change may no longer resemble each other phonetically: cow and beef both derive from the same Indo-European root, cow having developed through the Germanic language family while beef has arrived in English from the Italo-Romance family descent.
Cognates may thus also arise through borrowings into languages. So the resemblance between English to pay and French payer originates through English borrowing to pay from Norman which, like French, had derived its word from Gallo-Romance.
False cognates
False cognates are words that are commonly thought to be related (have a common origin) whereas linguistic examination reveals they are unrelated. Thus, for example, on the basis of superficial similarities one might suppose that the Latin verb habere and German haben, both meaning 'to have', are cognates. However, an understanding of the way words in the two languages evolve from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots shows that they cannot be cognate. German haben (like English have) in fact comes from PIE *kap, 'to grasp', and its real cognate in Latin is capere, 'to seize, grasp, capture'. Latin habere, on the other hand, is from PIE *ghabh, 'to give, to receive', and hence cognate with English give and German geben.
The similarity of words between languages is not enough to demonstrate that the words are related to each other, in much the same way that facial resemblance does not determine whether two people are genetically related. Over the course of hundreds and thousands of years, words may change their sound completely. Thus, for example, English five and Sanskrit pança are cognates, while English over and Hebrew a'var are not, and neither are English dog and Mbabaram dog.
Contrast this with false friends, which frequently are cognate.