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For example, Old French boef is cognate with English cow, so English cow and beef are doublets. Translations , or semantic equivalents, are words in two different languages that have similar or practically identical meanings.
More specifically, the verb is one that is ordinarily intransitive (lacking any object), and the cognate object is simply the verb's noun form. For example, in the sentence He slept a troubled sleep, sleep is the cognate object of the verb slept. This construction also has a passive form. The passive is A troubled sleep was slept by him.
That makes this sentence a polyptoton. Examples in modern English are the phrases "might and main" (both of which are derived from the Proto-Indo-European root megʰ-) and "chai tea", in which both come from words for tea (cha and te) in different Chinese dialects. The figura etymologica has both a narrower and a broader definition.
For example, there are two forms of the verb "to start": (7) 会議が始まる。 (Kaigi ga hajimaru., "The meeting starts.") (8) 会長が会議を始める。 (Kaichō ga kaigi o hajimeru., "The president starts the meeting.") In Japanese, the form of the verb indicates the number of arguments the sentence needs to have. [2]
Derivative cognates are a classification of Chinese characters which have similar meanings and often the same etymological root, but which have diverged in pronunciation and meaning. An example is the doublet 考 and 老. At one time they were pronounced similarly and meant "old (person)."
This list contains Germanic elements of the English language which have a close corresponding Latinate form. The correspondence is semantic—in most cases these words are not cognates, but in some cases they are doublets, i.e., ultimately derived from the same root, generally Proto-Indo-European, as in cow and beef, both ultimately from PIE *gʷōus.
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For example, the English mouse is cognate with Greek μῦς /mys/ and Latin mūs, all from an Indo-European word *mūs; none of them is borrowed from another. Similarly, acre is cognate to Latin ager and Greek αγρός, but not a borrowing; the prefix agro-is a borrowing from Greek, and the prefix agri-a borrowing from Latin.