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A Middle Irish cognate is given when the Old Irish form is unknown, and Gaulish, Cornish and/or Breton (modern) cognates may occasionally be given in place of or in addition to Welsh. For the Baltic languages, Lithuanian (modern) and Old Prussian cognates are given when possible. (Both Lithuanian and Old Prussian are included because Lithuanian ...
For example English starve and Dutch sterven 'to die' or German sterben 'to die' all descend from the same Proto-Germanic verb, *sterbaną 'to die'. Cognates also do not need to look or sound similar: English father, French père, and Armenian հայր (hayr) all descend directly from Proto-Indo-European *ph₂tḗr.
ˈ j eɪ z / may-YAYZ), also known as the three-witness principle or three-language principle, states that apparent cognates must be attested in at least three different, non-contiguous daughter languages in order to be used in linguistic reconstruction. The principle is named after the French linguist Antoine Meillet.
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.
For example, the Portuguese word fresta is descended from Latin fenestra "window" (and is thus cognate to French fenêtre, Italian finestra, Romanian fereastră and so on), but now means "skylight" and "slit". Cognates may exist but have become rare, such as hiniestra in Spanish, or dropped out of use entirely.
The term "false cognate" is sometimes misused to refer to false friends, but the two phenomena are distinct. [1] [2] False friends occur when two words in different languages or dialects look similar, but have different meanings. While some false friends are also false cognates, many are genuine cognates (see False friends § Causes). [2]
The Gaulish language, and presumably its many dialects and closely allied sister languages, left a few hundred words in French and many more in nearby Romance languages, i.e. Franco-Provençal (Eastern France and Western Switzerland), Occitan (Southern France), Catalan, Romansch, Gallo-Italic (Northern Italy), and many of the regional languages of northern France and Belgium collectively known ...
Quite a few of these words can further trace their origins back to a Germanic source (usually Frankish [1]), making them cognate with many native English words from Old English, yielding etymological twins. Many of these are Franco-German words, or French words of Germanic origin. [2]