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