Q: oblique cognates

[Isidore Dyen]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
It appears that you have run up against the distinction between lexical
cognation, the cognation between words implying the existence of a word or
d lexeme in their last common protolanguage on the one hand and root
cognation or perhaps better put, morpheme cognation in their last common
protolanguage. What is causing some confusion is that morpheme
cognation is likely to have had a longer history or past life than
a lexical cognation.
To turn to your 'tooth' example, there appears little reason to doubt that
the forms cited continue in some way what was in the protolanguage a
single lexeme whose base varied in different inflectional combinations in
terms of which later different stages (either dialects or daughter
languages) reached their own reorganizations into inflections through
analogical changes. The results of such changes can be said to be
obliquely cognate or cognate in any other way that one likes, but it is
best to keep in mind that they are each aproduct of different
uninterrupted contiuities.
 
On Wed, 30 Sep 1998, Larry Trask wrote:
 
> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> I am looking for a term for a certain non-canonical type of
> cognation.
>
> One non-canonical variety is as follows.  Latin <dent-> `tooth'
> requires a PIE *<dent->.  English `tooth' and Greek <odont-> require
> a PIE *<dont->.  Gothic <tunth> requires a PIE *<dnt->.  The several
> forms are therefore not strictly descended from a single ancestral
> form, but rather from variant forms of a single root.  Such forms as
> the Latin, English and Gothic ones have been called `oblique
> cognates' in the literature.  Fine.
>
> But there's another case.  English `head' is directly cognate with
> Latin <caput> `head'.  However, Spanish <cabeza> does not descend
> directly from <caput>, but rather from a suffixed derivative of this.
> Therefore the English and Spanish words are not directly cognate,
> even though they are indirectly cognate in an important way.  Is
> there a label for this kind of cognation?  What would you prefer to
> call the relationship between the English and Spanish words?
>
> Larry Trask
> COGS
> University of Sussex
> Brighton BN1 9QH
> England
>
> larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
>