Russian word for "cognate"

[Harold D. Baker]

>Does anyone know the Russian word for "cognate"? Sorry to confess my
>ignorance but I can't get to the library. And please settle a dispute:
>is a cognate a word that has been borrowed and then Russified, as in
>"demagogia" or is that a borrowing? Please enlighten me--I am em-
>barrassed to put it on the screen, but...Emily Tall

A borrowing (Rus. zaimstvovanie) is a word taken from another language and
used more or less in its original form: landshaft (from Ger. Landschaft),
peizazh (from Fr. paysage), etc. Also if the word's form is altered to
conform with the morphology of the home language I think that is still a
borrowing: pikantnyi, simpatichnyi, komprometirovat'. A calque (Rus.
kal'ka) is a word composed entirely from etymological elements in the home
language but whose structure is taken from a foreign word: v/pechat/lenie
(from Latin im/press/io). The word "theology," for instance, can be
translated into Russian two ways, one through a borrowing (teologiia) and
one through a calque (bogoslovie). Of course the English word "theology" is
itself a borrowing from Greek, which is here the host language for Russian.
A cognate is a word having a common etymological ancestor with a word in
another language; a word derived from a word in another language is not
properly a cognate, but a derivative. Thus "moder" (Anglo-Saxon) and
"mater" (Latin) are cognates (both derived from an unknown Indo-European
parent word), whereas the English "maternal" is derived from the Latin.
Entire languages may also be called cognate and derived: Old Slavonic and
Anglo-Saxon are cognate languages; Bulgarian is derived from Old Slavonic.
There is no handy Russian word for cognate: "cognates" is translated as
"slova obshchego proiskhozhdeniia" or "slova odnogo kornia."

Harold D. Baker
Program in Russian
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA 92717 USA
1-714-824-6183/Fax 1-714-824-2379