Part II · Chapter 5

Relatives on the Road

Three ways to look alike

Two words from different languages can look alike for three reasons, and half the art of learning languages with this method is telling them apart.

First reason: inheritance. Both words descend from one old word, and each language reshaped it in its own way. Father and padre are like that: both come, by separate roads, from the same Proto-Indo-European word. Nobody lent it to anybody. They're like cousins who inherited the same great-grandfather's nose.

Second reason: the loan. One language took the word from another, ready-made. Tomato is like that: English took it from Spanish tomate, and Spanish had taken it from Nahuatl tomatl. Chocolate came the same way, from Nahuatl chocolātl. There's no common ancestor here; there's a trip from one language to another.

Third reason: coincidence. The two words share no history and borrowed nothing from each other, and still they look alike. Like two strangers who look alike on the street. Not being relatives doesn't mean the resemblance doesn't matter: in chapter 12 you'll see that endolinguistics takes it very seriously.

From the outside, all three look the same. That's why you need to learn to look inside them, and to ask history.

Co-derivatives

Linguists call words of the first kind cognates: words "born together." In endolinguistics we prefer another name, co-derivatives, because it underlines what matters to us. A co-derivative is a word that, descending from a common source, keeps the code. We don't care about etymology in the abstract; we care about the bone that survived the trip.

Co-derivatives are where this method pays off most, and where it's most honest. When you learn padre knowing it's father with another accent, you're not inventing a connection to help you remember: you're seeing a connection that exists, that's documented, that linguistics has checked with hundreds of examples. That's why the golden rule of working with codes to learn languages is this:

Loans travel too

Loans aren't relatives, but they have their own history, and sometimes it's more adventurous than a co-derivative's.

Look at the journey of sugar. It started in India, in Sanskrit, as śárkarā. From there it went into Middle Persian, šakar. From Persian into Arabic, sukkar. From Arabic it moved into the languages of Europe, passing from hand to hand until it reached English. Several languages, more than one family, thousands of miles. The word changed hands like merchandise, and in fact it traveled with the merchandise.

Arabic gave English more than sugar. Alcohol comes from Arabic al-kuḥl, and algebra from al-jabr, "the resetting of broken parts." Notice the al- at the start: it's the Arabic word for "the," and it came along glued to the noun. Spanish is full of words like that, because Arabic was spoken in Spain for centuries: almohada (pillow), aceite (oil, from az-zayt, "the oil"), azúcar (sugar). Many Spanish words that start with al- or az- come from that trip. Many, not all: alto and alma come from Latin, so you have to check each one.

Sometimes loan and inheritance cross. Spanish ganso and English goose are relatives: they come from the same Germanic word. But Spanish didn't inherit it from Latin; it borrowed it from Gothic, the language of one of the Germanic peoples who arrived in Spain about fifteen hundred years ago. A relative who came to visit and stayed.

False friends

Here's where it gets delicate. A false friend is a word in another language that looks like one of yours but doesn't mean the same thing. Everyone who studies Spanish meets a few. The problem is that there are two kinds of false friends, and almost nobody tells you.

Kind 1: relatives who changed jobs

Some false friends are relatives. They come from the same word, but in each language the meaning drifted until it landed somewhere different.

The embarazada case is the best one, and you've probably been told it wrong. A lot of people say embarrassed and embarazada have nothing to do with each other and that the resemblance is a coincidence. It isn't. English took embarrass from French embarrasser, and French took it from Spanish or Portuguese embaraçar, which meant "to tangle, to hamper." That word came from baraço, "cord, noose," which in turn came from Arabic marasa, "rope." The two words are relatives. Deep down, both talk about something that tangles you up, that gets in your way. In English the hindrance became shame; in Spanish it became pregnancy.

The lesson matters: kinship doesn't guarantee meaning. Two co-derivatives can travel so far that they no longer mean the same thing. The code helps you remember the word; usage tells you what it means. If you trust only the code, you'll tell someone in Spanish that you're embarazada when you meant something quite different.

Kind 2: strangers who look alike

Other false friends have no kinship at all, and sometimes they look astonishingly alike. The most striking case for an English speaker is much and Spanish mucho: same meaning, almost the same sound, the same code… and no kinship. You'll look at it calmly in chapter 12, because it teaches two things at once: the limits of this method and one of its most interesting mysteries.

The two layers of English

And now one of the most useful things this manual can give you for learning Spanish.

English has, for many ideas, two words from two different worlds. One is the everyday word, inherited through the Germanic branch: short, old, homely. The other is a learned word, borrowed from Latin or from French, the language of law, school and science: longer, fancier, a bit formal. Look:

Do you see what happens? Your fancy words are Spanish's everyday words. The Latin words that English kept for formal occasions are, in Spanish, the words people use at breakfast. Spanish wore them down with centuries of use (nocturnal and noche share their bone; ocular and ojo too, though ojo lost most of it on the road), but the family is the same. That's why your learned English vocabulary is a direct door into Spanish. When you meet a Spanish word you don't know, ask whether it might be the everyday twin of a fancy word you already own.

A detail worth noticing: in some rows the everyday English word is a relative too (father, mother, night, tooth, eye, hound, foot all share a Proto-Indo-European ancestor with the other two). In others (hair, son, iron, story) the everyday word comes from a different root altogether. Either way, the learned word is your bridge.

(Some rows are subtler than others. Hablar and fable both come from Latin fabula, "a telling"; Spanish turned "to tell stories" into plain "to speak." Hijo and hierro lost their first letter on the way, and chapter 6 tells you exactly why.)

The false-friend test

Before you accept a connection between two words from different languages, ask yourself these four questions:

1. Do they sound alike inside? Take the skeleton of the root and the code of both. If they don't even share the nucleus, there's probably no useful connection.
2. Do they share a history? Look it up. An etymological dictionary will tell you in a minute. If you don't have one at hand, an English dictionary with etymologies and the Spanish Diccionario de la lengua española online are good places to start.
3. Do they mean the same today? Even if they're relatives, check how they're used in real sentences in the other language. Usage is the referee.
4. Is it inheritance or a loan? That tells you what kind of connection you can use.

It sounds like a lot of work. At first it is. But with practice it becomes a two-second gesture, a small deliberate doubt before you store a word in memory: is this real kinship, or a chance echo? That gesture is what separates people who learn fast from people who make mistakes fast.

In the next chapter you'll discover that languages don't change words at random: they follow rules. And those rules can be learned the way you learn a magic trick, once, to use a thousand times.