`cognate'

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:

>This posting will not be news to the linguists on this list, who may prefer
>to stop reading at this point, unless they want to offer criticisms of the
>definitions below.  But I have noticed that a significant number of
>non-linguists on this list have apparently misunderstood the sense of our
>technical term `cognate': many of them
>appear to believe that `cognates' means something like `words of similar
>form

- that's odd; I always assumed it meant "derived from a common ancestral
word".  You know, like Tiwaz and dyaus.