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In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymology ancestor in a common Language family. (2025). 9781444356755, Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 9781444356755
Because language change can have radical effects on both the sound and the meaning of a word, cognates may not be obvious, and it often takes rigorous study of historical sources and the application of the comparative method to establish whether are cognate. It can also happen that words which appear similar, or identical, in different languages, are not cognate.
Cognates are distinguished from , where a word has been borrowed from another language.
The Arabic سلام , the Hebrew language שלום , the Assyrian Neo-Aramaic ܫܠܡܐ and Amharic language ሰላም 'peace' are cognates, derived from the Proto-Semitic *šalām- 'peace'.
The Guarani language panambi, the Eastern Bolivian Guarani panapana, the Cocama language and Omagua language panama, and the Sirionó ana ana are cognates, derived from the Tupi language panapana 'butterfly', maintaining their original meaning in these Tupi languages. Brazilian Portuguese panapanã (flock of butterflies in flight) is a borrowing rather than a cognate of the other words.
Cognates also do not need to look or sound similar: English , French language , and Armenian ( hayr) all descend directly from Proto-Indo-European *ph₂tḗr. An extreme case is Armenian ( erku) and English , which descend from Proto-Indo-European *dwóh₁; the sound change *dw > erk in Armenian is regular.
Paradigms of conjugations or declensions, the correspondence of which cannot be generally due to chance, have often been used in cognacy assessment. However, beyond paradigms, morphosyntax is often excluded in the assessment of cognacy between words, mainly because structures are usually seen as more subject to borrowing. Still, very complex, non-trivial morphosyntactic structures can rarely take precedence over phonetic shapes to indicate cognates. For instance, Tangut language, the language of the Western Xia Empire, and one Horpa language language spoken today in Sichuan, Geshiza, both display a verbal alternation indicating tense, obeying the same morphosyntactic collocational restrictions. Even without regular phonetic correspondences between the stems of the two languages, the cognatic structures indicate secondary cognacy for the stems.
Likewise, English much and Spanish mucho look similar and have a similar meaning, but are not cognates: much is from Proto-Germanic < PIE and mucho is from Latin multum < PIE . A true cognate of much is the archaic Spanish maño 'big'.
are words inherited across a language barrier, coming from a particular etymon in an ancestor language. For example, Russian мо́ре and Polish morze are both descendants of Proto-Slavic * moře (meaning sea).
Similar to the distinction between etymon and root, a nuanced distinction can sometimes be made between a descendant and a derivative.
A derivative is one of the words which have their source in a root word, and were at some time created from the root word using morphological constructs such as suffixes, prefixes, and slight changes to the vowels or to the consonants of the root word. For example unhappy, happily, and unhappily are all derivatives of the root word happy.
The terms root and derivative are used in the analysis of morphological derivation within a language in studies that are not concerned with historical linguistics and that do not cross the language barrier.
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