COGNATE

Cognate

In linguistics, cognates are words that have a common etymological origin. This learned term derives from the Latin cognatus .

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cognate

Noun

  1. One of a number of things allied in origin or nature.
  2. One who is related to another on the female side.
  3. One who is related to another, both having descended from a common ancestor through legal marriages.
  4. A word either descended from the same base word of the same ancestor language as the given word, or strongly believed to be a regular reflex of the same reconstructed root of proto-language as the given word.
    English is a cognate of Greek , German , Russian and Persian .
    English and , Russian , Icelandic and Irish are all cognates.

Adjective

  1. Allied by blood; kindred by birth; specifically related on the mother's side.
  2. Of the same or a similar nature; of the same family; proceeding from the same stock or root; allied; kindred.
  3. Either descended from the same attested source lexeme of ancestor language, or held on the grounds of the methods of historical linguistics to be regular reflexes of the unattested, reconstructed form of a proto-language.
    English is cognate to Greek , German , Russian and Persian .
    In English, is cognate to , both of which are cognate to Russian , Icelandic and Irish .
    In English, shirt is cognate to skirt, both descended from the Proto-Indo-European word *sker-, meaning "to cut".


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: cognate
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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