Cognates

A cognate is a word that has similar etymological origins to a word from another language. These words are often used to identify relations between different languages, such as English, Spanish, French, and German, which are all part of the Indo-European family. More specifically, even, Spanish and English are both of Latin origin, which gives these two languages a large number of shared cognates. The closer that the languages are related to each other, the more cognates can be found. While most words are different in each language, some words are similar or even exactly the same, such as metal and metal in English and Spanish, and accent akzent in English and German. If the etymology of these example words were looked up, the reader would notice that the etymological facts of both cognates would be similar or even exactly the same. However, there are two types of words that appear to be cognates but are not, which include false cognates and false friends. False cognates mean almost the same thing in two different languages, but have different roots, and false friends have similar roots but diverging meanings. I feel that cognates may have further roots that I may explore, but my searches are beginning to come up dry. If I stumble upon new information on these words, I will be sure to articulate it.