`cognate'

[Larry Trask]

On Fri, 9 Jul 1999 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

[LT]

>> 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.

Yes, but non-linguists often misunderstand the term, and I've noticed
several queries on this list in the last few weeks from people who had
apparently misunderstood it.

By the way, the following article presents a small but spectacular
sample of cognates which do not resemble one another at all:

John Lynch (1999), `Language change in southern Melanesia: linguistic
aberrancy and genetic distance'. In Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs
(eds), Arachaeology and Language IV, pp. 149-159, London: Routledge.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk