User talk:KYPark/cognates

cognates, kins or relatives

This is an extension to the previous section, aiming for easy edit.

1. The noun life, as in "she lived a happy life," is called the cognate object with respect to the verb lived. Both are cognate or akin to each other, regardless of their part of speech and priority to the other.
2. In 1973 I bought the first print in 1973 of Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary. Ever since I have got used to its etymology and kinship (in terms of "akin to") rather than cognation, if different. I have no idea what ought to be the difference between them, on what grounds, in Wiktionary.
3. It sounds silly to say the tenses of a verb, say, lives and lived are cognate, because their relation is more specific than, and inclusive of, cognation.
4. In contrast, such is not the case with the various parts of speech in a family of cognates, such as life, live, lively, alive,etc. It is often unclear which is really prior or parallel, say,
   • English life and live (even if not, suppose as such),
   • German Gondel ("gondola") and gondeln ("to wave"),
   but clear that both are cognates, kins, relatives, or the like! Thus, one entry of them lists another in Related terms. See:
   • life#Related terms, and
   • live#Related terms, as I newly edited.
5. In general, when the entry is prior, more or less ancestral, its derivatives within the language are listed in Derived terms, those without in Descendants, and the rest of the relatives (of similar, clear or unclear priority) in Related terms.
6. For the time being, please avoid introducing and confusing the borrowing with the cognation or kinship, unless sophistication or complication is intended, as the former is hopelessly slippery, and there appears no formal place for it here in Wiktionary. Should it be unavoidable, then, as a prerequisite, please take the giraffe for example and make clear either borrowing or cognate relations among its equivalents or translations in all major languages, East and West. --nemo 03:38, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

This is a useful distinction, though of course in many cases we can't tell the difference. See my comments above: there appear to be conventions to consider borrowings as cognates as well as to exclude them as cognates. Thus it is not a matter of incorrect usage so much as which convention would be more useful to our purposes. kwami 20:02, 25 July 2009 (UTC)