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An etymon, or ancestor word, is the ultimate source word from which one or more cognates derive. In other words, it is the source of related words in different languages. For example, the etymon of both Welsh ceffyl and Irish capall is the Proto-Celtic *kaballos (all meaning horse).
Generally, words coming from French often retain a higher register than words of Old English origin, and they are considered by some to be more posh, elaborate, sophisticated, or pretentious. However, there are exceptions: weep , groom and stone (from Old English) occupy a slightly higher register than cry , brush and rock (from French).
Online Etymology Dictionary, Harper, D. "French words within complete sentences, text + audio files". parisbypod.com. Mathematical Words: Origins and Sources (John Aldrich, University of Southampton) See Section on Contribution of French.
The following conventions are used: Cognates are in general given in the oldest well-documented language of each family, although forms in modern languages are given for families in which the older stages of the languages are poorly documented or do not differ significantly from the modern languages.
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]
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.
Linguists find that it is difficult to find a word list where all words used are culturally unbiased. [8] Many alternative word lists have been compiled by other linguists and often use fewer meaning slots. The percentage of cognates (words with a common origin) in the word lists is then measured. The larger the percentage of cognates, the more ...
An attested word from which a root in the proto-language is reconstructed is a reflex. More generally, a reflex is the known derivative of an earlier form, which may be either attested or reconstructed. A reflex that is predictable from the reconstructed history of the language is a 'regular' reflex. Reflexes of the same source are cognates.