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A borrowing or loanword is when a word from language A is added to the lexicon of language B, with whatever phonological adaptations are necessary.

But is a cognate only a word directly inherited from an ancestor language, or is it correct to say that any two words than can be traced back to a common ancestor word are cognates?

Obviously in the history of a word both things can happen:

  • An Old English word and its descendant in Modern English are cognates.
  • Is a word borrowed into Old English and its descendant in Modern English cognates?
  • Would the Modern English word be cognate to the original word in the language that lent it to Old English?
  • Would the Modern English word be cognate to a modern word in another modern language descended from the word in its ancestor language that Old English borrowed it from?

How should we most correctly use the term cognate?

hippietrail
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  • If anybody would like to edit in an example for each case that would be great! – hippietrail Oct 09 '13 at 11:20
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    To clarify this bounty: @limetom's source does disambiguate and is now tied for highest-voted answer. But I would be interested in some confirmation from actual usage that that source is more authoritative than David Crystal cited in dainichi's answer. – Luke Sawczak Mar 28 '18 at 18:47

3 Answers3

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Cognates are only words shared in two sister varieties that have been inherited genetically from a parent variety. From Campbell and Mixco's A Glossary of Historical Linguistics:

cognate A word (or morpheme) that is related to a word (morpheme) in sister languages by reason of these words (morphemes) having been inherited by the related languages from a common word (morpheme) of the proto-language from which they descend. For example, Italian cane /kane/, Portuguese cão /kãũ/, French chien /syɛ̃/ ‘dog’, are all cognates, since they descend in these Romance languages from the same original word in Latin (ancestor of the Romance languages): canis ‘dog’. (Campbell and Mixco 2007: 33-4)

For your hypothetical examples:

  • The first one is uncontroversially a cognate.
  • In your second example, the OE form and the ModE form (but not the form from wherever it originated) are cognate.
  • In your third example, the ModE form and the form in language X are not cognate because they don't go back to a common origin.
  • And equally, the ModE form and the form in language Y (a descendant of language X) are also not cognate, as they do not go back to a common genetic ancestor (to be clear, the forms, not the languages).

Common ancestors are only genetic ancestors, despite how people might informally use "common ancestor". Chinese 豆腐 (standard Mandarin dòufu) was loaned into both Japanese, as 豆腐 toufu, and into Korean, as 두부 dubu. These forms share a common origin (a loan from some Sinitic language at some point into Korean and Japanese), but they aren't from a common ancestor (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are not related). The Mandarin, Hakka (teu55 fu55), and Hokkien (tāu-hū) forms, on the other hand, are cognate.

limetom
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    Interesting. This all suggests that we lack a term I would regard as important. Cognate covers the relationship between it cane and fr chien; loan covers the relationship between zh 豆腐 and ja 豆腐; coincidence covers the relationship between en dog and Mbabaram dog. But we have to resort to circumlocutions to describe the relationship between ja 豆腐 and ko 두부! – hippietrail Oct 09 '13 at 10:36
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    I have a friend who jokingly calls these things frognates (from "leapfrog cognates"), but I don't know of any word for this situation in particular. Perhaps parallel borrowings? – limetom Oct 09 '13 at 11:14
  • Maybe just the weaker/broader term "related (to)"? – hippietrail Oct 09 '13 at 11:16
  • So Campbell and Mixco don't rule out using the term to refer to a borrowing which is cognate with an 'original' word in the borrowing language? – Gaston Ümlaut Oct 09 '13 at 12:07
  • They aren't explicit, but I'm pretty sure do actually rule out doublets--like English shirt and skirt which have the same etymological source--as being cognate. A borrowing is not an inheritance. A lot of this comes down to people not being careful with how they use the term "inheritance". In this technical sense, inheritances have to be instances of transmission (a form being replicated down a continuous line of native speakers), rather than diffusion (a form being replicated by one speech community copying/"borrowing" a form from another) (here cf. Labov 2007). – limetom Oct 09 '13 at 12:24
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    The charts below of PIE roots and their offspring distinguish between cognates and borrowings; and, yes, a word can be both. English is loaded with borrowed cognates of native words, like hound and canine. PIE roots: *peŋkʷe-, *dei-, *sed-, *genə-. – jlawler Oct 09 '13 at 15:29
  • @jlawler "a word can be both", can you elaborate on this? As far as I can see, by the given definition, you can borrow a cognate, but once it's entered the borrowing language, it's no longer a cognate, since it hasn't been inherited from the proto-language by the borrowing language. – dainichi Oct 09 '13 at 15:56
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    I'm sure @jlawler is correct. But also the point made by limetom is crucial. It is possible to borrow and cognate, and it is still considered cognate. But it's normally described as a borrowing as it can't be used for historical reconstruction as tho it was a cognate inherited from a proto-language. – Gaston Ümlaut Oct 09 '13 at 21:32
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    @dainichi: Once a cognate, always a cognate. If you'll note from the *genə- chart, cognate means 'born together'. If your brother moves to a different country and speaks a different language, is he still your brother? – jlawler Oct 09 '13 at 22:12
  • @jlawler: In terms of linguistics, he is no longer your brother. Diffusion is a different kind of process from transmission and we should really be careful not to conflate them. Cognates only arise through transmission, and since lexical borrowing/copying is a kind of transmission, even if the forms have the same etymological origin, and are even from the same family (like English shirt and skirt), they shouldn't be considered cognate. As I mentioned above, there's no good term for this (fairly common) situation other than something like doublet, but that's a specific kind of this. – limetom Oct 09 '13 at 23:11
  • Hey, if you wanna define it that way' but I'm just a linguist, not a theoretician. – jlawler Oct 10 '13 at 01:08
  • So if it were discovered that Chinese actually got its word for tofu from a long forgotten Manchu or Khitan word or that Latin got the ancestor of "chien" from a non-Italic language, we would have to cease regarding the modern descents of all these words as cognates. Which of course would entirely break down further back than the reconstructed protolanguages we know today since we don't actually know the actual origin of most words in most languages... – hippietrail Dec 30 '17 at 03:52
  • I agree with most of this answer, but not the first two bullet points. An OE word and its ModE descendant are absolutely not uncontroversially cognates, because they do not descend through separate branches from the same origin; one descends directly from the other. OE and ModE are not sister languages and can by definition never produce cognates. Cognates are the linguistic equivalent of siblings or cousins, and your parent or ancestor is not your sibling – there needs to be a common branching point for a cognate pair to be established. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 21 '22 at 01:31
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Just to illustrate that there is not a complete consensus about the definition, this is how David Crystal defines it in A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics

cognate (adj./n.) (1) A language or a linguistic form which is historically derived from the same source as another language/form, e.g. Spanish/Italian/ French/Portuguese are ‘cognate languages’ (or ‘cognates’); père/padre, etc. (‘father’) are ‘cognate words’ or cognates.

As far as I can see, by this definition, loanwords would also be cognate words.

Wikipedia also seems to share this definition, and it explicitly mentions the "cognate doublet" shirt and skirt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognate

dainichi
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    Yes, precisely! The reason borrowed cognates are not much discussed is because they can't be used in historical reconstruction in the same way as forms which were inherited from the parent language. Instead, borrowed cognates have to be treated as borrowings. This distinction is crucial to linguistic stratigraphy, where layers of borrowings at different points in time can provide important information. – Gaston Ümlaut Oct 09 '13 at 21:36
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Cognate isn't a very well defined term in linguistics, and can mean all of the above definitions, although the distinctions about origin are only applied to historical linguistics. The main distinction is cognate v. non-cognate, which indicates synonyms between languages that share a phonological representation v. synonyms that do not share a phonological representation. In theory, they should be translational equivalents, but in practice this is not generally true, especially for abstract concepts. Cognates can be loanwords (aka borrowings), and this is from language contact situations. The roots of these words are shared, even when the languages do not share any (recent? obvious?) historical root. They will sound similar, but not the same, as borrowed words do not generally keep the sounds of the original language, but adapt to the new speakers' phonology. Additionally, words that sound the same can homophones (aka false-friends). These are words that generally bear no conceptual overlap. However, the binary distinction of words isn't really accurate, as words considered homophonous may have some conceptual overlap due to shared historical roots.

DFahey
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