Back when I was teaching, I had the good fortune of being able to create a couple classes. One of those was Linguistics, and in that class I required my students to do a mini-report each week about a word of their choosing. In the report, they needed to share the word’s “etymology” and in doing that, the students soon came to realize that the bulk of the English words that aren’t true descendants of Old or Middle English come to us from Latin and/or Greek.

The word “etymology” comes to us from Greek, and it combines two words: etymon which means the “true and literal meaning of a word according to its origin” and logia which means “the science or study of.”

etymology — the study of historical linguistic change, especially as manifested in individual words (There are other meanings/explanations of this word, but this definition best fits what I asked of my students in that Linguistics class and what I’m attempting to do here with “Cognate Cognizance.”)

etimología — the Spanish cognate of the same meaning

etimologia — the Italian cognate and also the Portuguese one with a different pronunciation

étymologie — the French cognate

If you are looking at the “etymological” journey of a word, you can see where the word originated and how it’s changed over the years, not only in its spelling but also in its usage. That word is “etimolόgico” in Spanish to describe masculine things and “etimolόgica” to describe feminine things.

It becomes an adverb when we say “etymologically” and that word is “etimolόgicamente” in Spanish because you add “-mente” to the feminine forms of adjectives to create adverbs (for the most part). I recently learned that, etymologically speaking, the word “dog” has no known origin, and I found that to be quite interesting considering the prevalence of dogs and the relative simplicity of the English word.

In this publication, I’ve been trying to help you learn and enhance your own English vocabulary by connecting you to cognates in Spanish, and sometimes in the other Romance languages. If you know a word in English, and it has a cognate in Spanish, you will more easily learn and remember the Spanish word if you choose to study that language, but if you already know some (or a lot of) Spanish, you may be delightfully surprised to see cognates of those words popping up in English and thus helping you to understand something you’re reading while also advancing your English lexicon (“cicatrix” and “succor” come to mind, for example).

The “etymology” of these cognates is the key to what makes them cognates.

I began this publication a little over four years ago, and I’ve shared more than 225 cognate duos with you since then. I’d like to encourage you to visit the archive and read any that you’ve missed or reread some to refresh your memory. Here’s a link to it: Cognate Cognizance archive

I hope to share another 225+ with you. I’d like more subscribers, too, so this post is free to everyone, and I hope you’ll share it with anyone you know who is interested in words.

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Until next time.

Tammy Marshall

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