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Word Cousins

Three short lessons on words that share an ancestor: one old root in many languages, the false friends that only look related, and the cousins a Vietnamese family already speaks.

Spark & Whetstone · sparkwhetstone.org/learn/word-cousins · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Answers are at the end, so you can try each question first.

Lesson 1. One root, many languages

English night, German Nacht, Spanish noche, French nuit and Italian notte look alike because they are related. They all descend from one very old word, reconstructed by linguists from the patterns in its descendants.

Words with a shared ancestor are called cognates. Finding them is a quick way into a new language: you may already know more of its words than you think.

Question. Why do night, noche and nuit look alike?

  1. They come from one ancestor word.
  2. English borrowed them all last century.
  3. By coincidence.

Say it back. In your own words: what is a cognate?

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Lesson 2. False friends

Some words look like cousins but mean something different. Spanish embarazada means pregnant, not embarrassed. French librairie is a bookshop, not a library.

These are called false friends. The fix is the same as with any word: check what it means in a sentence before you trust its looks.

Question. What does the Spanish word "embarazada" mean?

  1. Embarrassed
  2. Pregnant
  3. Embraced

Say it back. Say it back: how do you guard against false friends?

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Lesson 3. Cousins across Asia

Vietnamese borrowed a large share of its vocabulary from Chinese over many centuries. Korean and Japanese did too. So many words are cousins across all four.

The word for telephone is one example: Vietnamese điện thoại, Chinese diànhuà, Korean jeonhwa, Japanese denwa, all from the same two characters meaning "electric" and "speech". A child growing up with Vietnamese at home already holds keys to these cousins.

Question. Why do điện thoại, diànhuà and denwa sound alike?

  1. They come from the same two Chinese characters.
  2. They were all invented by one company.
  3. They are false friends.

Say it back. In your own words: what cousins does a home language give a child?

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At the table: The cousin hunt

Players: two or more, ideally speaking different languages. You'll need: paper and a pencil.

  1. Write ten everyday words in English: night, mother, water, star, new, two, three, name, heart, salt.
  2. Each person writes the same words in any other language they know.
  3. Circle the pairs that look like cousins.
  4. Check one circled pair together in a dictionary: cousin, or false friend?

Answers

  1. They come from one ancestor word. — They are cognates, descended from one old word.
  2. Pregnant — Embarazada means pregnant. It only looks like "embarrassed".
  3. They come from the same two Chinese characters. — All three come from the same two characters for "electric" and "speech".