From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!floyd!cmcl2!philabs!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn Newsgroups: net.nlang Title: Re: Cognates in lots of languages Article-I.D.: sdchema.446 Posted: Sun Mar 13 03:49:28 1983 Received: Mon Mar 14 03:07:47 1983 Reference: ecn-pa.791 If you think about it for a while, the word for tea is pretty obviously a borrowing; after all half of the languages on the given list are spoken in an area where tea was not used by the population until 500 years ago or so. The variation in form is dependent on how recently the word was borrowed, what words in the borrowing language normally sound like (borrowings often assimilate to native word patterns) and what the borrowed-from language is (not infrequently a language will borrow a word in another language that was originally a borrowing in yet another language...). The term cognate is most often used in linguistics for words in different languages that have a common "genetic" origin; that is to say, the modern words developed from a word that existed in the common ancestor of the languages. For example the English "five", the German "fuenf" and the French "cinq" are cognates despite their dissimilarity; I think they all stem from a very much older word that sounded like "kwinkwe" (or for those who prefer Anglicized phonetic orthography (sigh), like "queenquay"). Sometimes the differences in pronunciation and spelling between the words are large, sometimes not. For example, the word for five in Malay is "lima" (pronounced somewhat like the capital of Peru and NOT like most Americans pronounce the name of the bean) and it is the same in Hawaiian (also meaning "hand") and also (as I recall) in Malagasy, the language of Madagascar. Some words sound (or are spelled) the same in different languages but are not genetically related; these are "false cognates". My favorite example is the Indonesian word "air", which is pronounced like the English word "ire" and means "water". A "truk" with "AIR" printed on its back is a water truck. Etymology is the study of the origins of words. Philology is etymology as an end in itself. Historical linguistics is the study of why there has to be etymology. A mere Linguistics grad student, Donn Seeley UCSD Chemistry Dept. RRCF ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn UCSD Linguistics Dept. sdamos!donn@nprdc