Cognate Cognizance Podcast

Back when I was teaching, I had the good fortune of being able to create a couple classes. One of those was Linguistics, and in that class I required my students to do a mini-report each week about a word of their choosing. In the report, they needed to share the word’s “etymology” and in doing that, the students soon came to realize that the bulk of the English words that aren’t true descendants of Old or Middle English come to us from Latin and/or Greek.

The word “etymology” comes to us from Greek, and it combines two words: etymon which means the “true and literal meaning of a word according to its origin” and logia which means “the science or study of.”

etymology — the study of historical linguistic change, especially as manifested in individual words (There are other meanings/explanations of this word, but this definition best fits what I asked of my students in that Linguistics class and what I’m attempting to do here with “Cognate Cognizance.”)

etimología — the Spanish cognate of the same meaning

etimologia — the Italian cognate and also the Portuguese one with a different pronunciation

étymologie — the French cognate

If you are looking at the “etymological” journey of a word, you can see where the word originated and how it’s changed over the years, not only in its spelling but also in its usage. That word is “etimolόgico” in Spanish to describe masculine things and “etimolόgica” to describe feminine things.

It becomes an adverb when we say “etymologically” and that word is “etimolόgicamente” in Spanish because you add “-mente” to the feminine forms of adjectives to create adverbs (for the most part). I recently learned that, etymologically speaking, the word “dog” has no known origin, and I found that to be quite interesting considering the prevalence of dogs and the relative simplicity of the English word.

In this publication, I’ve been trying to help you learn and enhance your own English vocabulary by connecting you to cognates in Spanish, and sometimes in the other Romance languages. If you know a word in English, and it has a cognate in Spanish, you will more easily learn and remember the Spanish word if you choose to study that language, but if you already know some (or a lot of) Spanish, you may be delightfully surprised to see cognates of those words popping up in English and thus helping you to understand something you’re reading while also advancing your English lexicon (“cicatrix” and “succor” come to mind, for example).

The “etymology” of these cognates is the key to what makes them cognates.

I began this publication a little over four years ago, and I’ve shared more than 225 cognate duos with you since then. I’d like to encourage you to visit the archive and read any that you’ve missed or reread some to refresh your memory. Here’s a link to it: Cognate Cognizance archive

I hope to share another 225+ with you. I’d like more subscribers, too, so this post is free to everyone, and I hope you’ll share it with anyone you know who is interested in words.

Thanks for reading Cognate Cognizance! This post is public so feel free to share it.

If you’d care to become a subscriber, free or paid (paid receives the audio version, too, and more frequent posts), then please do so today.

Until next time.

Tammy Marshall

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cognatecognizance.substack.com/subscribe

In Chapter 6 of “The Sword in the Stone” by T. H. White, young Arthur, known in this story as the Wart, is practicing and learning archery with Sir Ector’s son, Kay, and there is this passage:

“They left the targets and had several shots at the popinjay — which was a large, bright-coloured artificial bird stuck on the top of a stick, like a parrot — and Kay missed these also.”

Prior to reading this book, I’d heard of the word “popinjay” and known it only by its now-standard meaning of “a strutting supercilious person.” Even though I’m a linguist, it’s just one of those words that I hadn’t given much thought to because it’s also one of those words that I seldom see.

However, in “The Sword in the Stone,” the word comes up frequently, and it had come up before the passage I’d quoted above, also in relation to archery, so I’d looked it up to see what it meant. This is the definition I found: “archaic: the figure of a parrot usually fixed on a pole used as a target in archery.” It was later in the story that White essentially defined the word for his readers, and it was then, too, that I had another of those lovely “aha” moments that come with having sound cognate cognizance.

Once the word “parrot” appeared to me twice — first in the archaic definition I’d found to relate the word to archery and secondly in the passage from Chapter 6, I made that connection with a Spanish word for “parrot.

popinjay — I’ve already given its current definition above, but originally this word was the English word for “parrot.” That definition is now obsolete. However, it can still refer to the image of a parrot on heraldry.

papagayo — the Spanish cognate that means “parrot”

The more commonly used word for “parrot” in Spanish is “loro,” and that’s the word I taught for 30 years, but way back when I first learned Spanish, the word I originally learned for “parrot” was “papagayo.” I hadn’t seen that word very often at all, though, over my three decades of teaching Spanish, so the first encounter with the word “popinjay” in White’s story didn’t ring any mental, linguistic bells for me, but the second encounter with it did.

Parrots like to strut about, so over time, the word “popinjay” stopped referring to the bird itself and began referring to people who strutted about like one. Here’s more about that from merriam-webster.com:

Popinjays and parrots are birds of a feather. Popinjay, from the Middle French word papegai, is the original name for a parrot in English. The French word, in turn, came from the Arabic word for the bird, babghā’. Parrot, which English speakers adopted later, is probably a modification of the Middle French perroquet, which is also the source of the English parakeet. In the days of Middle English, parrots were rare and exotic, and it was quite a compliment to be called a popinjay after such a beautiful bird. But by the 1500s, parrots had become more commonplace, and their gaudy plumage and vulgar mimicry helped popinjay develop the pejorative sense we use today.

Other Romance languages use cognates of “popinjay” for their words for “parrot.” For example, the Italian word is “pappagallo.” Spanish has “papagayo” but tends to use “loro” for “parrot,” a word they adopted after conquering the Taíno people of the Caribbean where “parrots” are quite prolific.

Once, it was considered a compliment to be called a “popinjay,” but nowadays, if someone calls you that, you may want to check your attitude for unnecessary vanity and strutting about. Don’t become another type of target — the one for ridicule instead of arrows.

Until next time. This is November’s free post. If you’re not a paying subscriber, you missed another great word from T.H. White’s story last week — probity. To receive these posts weekly and to have access to the audio version as well as the full archive of more than 240 posts, upgrade to paying today. It’s only a handful of dollars every month. Thanks.

Tammy Marshall

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cognatecognizance.substack.com/subscribe

Since the very first time I visited the Prado museum in Madrid, Spain, I knew its name translated to “meadow” in English and that it had been named that due to the meadow that was there when it was first being built in 1785 — it is now surrounded by the city. It was going to be called something else, but everyone called it “el prado,” for “the meadow,” and the name stuck.

Recently, I’ve been on a number of long drives across parts of Nebraska, and the wild sunflowers are in splendid bloom, especially across the prairies and in the roadside ditches. I got to thinking about the word “prairie” and its relatively strange spelling. Turns out we took it from French, a Romance language, and French took their word from the common spelling of the Latin word for “meadow” which is pratum. Spanish created its word for “meadow,” “prado,” from that same Latin word. A “prairie” and a “meadow” are kind of the same thing — it’s more a sense of scale that differentiates between the two entities. Thus, the Spanish word for “prairie” also came from the same Latin source.

prairie — a stretch of land that is covered mostly in grass

pradera — the Spanish cognate of the same meaning

Because a “meadow” and a “prairie” are essentially the same thing — stretches of land covered in grass — some translations will offer up “prado” for “prairie,” too. I believe that if all the historical information I’ve seen over the years about the Prado Museum would use the word “prairie” instead of “meadow,” I would have made the connection a long time ago instead of having a hard time associating the word “prado” with our word “meadow,” to which it bears no likeness.

It certainly bears a likeness to “prairie,” however. In both “prado” and “pradera,” it is only that initial “p,” “r,” and “a” that contain the likeness. Because of that and the strange way (thanks to us taking it from French’s praierie) we spell “prairie,” I never really connected the dots even though now, looking at the words side by side, it seems very obvious that they are related, or cognates.

Our word of “meadow” comes down to us from Old English. Once again, I believe we now differentiate between the two words based more on how expansive the land covered in grass is. If it’s huge and goes on and on, we call it a “prairie,” but if it’s somewhat contained and even picturesque, we call it a “meadow.”

Either word, though, can be “prado” in Spanish, while “prairie” is simply “pradera.” If you’re a fan of the book series “Little House on the Prairie” and ever want to read the books in Spanish translation, look for “La Casa de la Pradera.”

And if you ever get to Madrid, be sure to visit the very much non-meadowlike museum named for the meadow in which it once stood — El Prado.

Until next time. This is September’s free post, and this is my birthday month. If you’re so inclined at all to grant me a birthday wish, upgrade to paid status for at least one month to receive these weekly posts, to have access to the full archive of more than 200 posts, and to have access to the audio versions of each where you can hear me reading them to you.

Tammy Marshall

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cognatecognizance.substack.com/subscribe

School is about to start. When I was young, my first year of school was “kindergarten.” I’ve long known that we got the word from German where it’s a combination of the words “kinder” for “children” and “garten” for “garden.” Spanish uses the very same word. I’m not going to define the word this week because we all know what “kindergarten” is.

Instead, I want to point out something that you may or may not have noticed in all these “Cognate Cognizance” posts — the letter K is rarely used in Spanish. This is because they don’t really need it. Anytime they want to make that sound, they can use the letter C followed by an A, an O, or a U, or they can use the combination of QUE or QUI. Spanish only uses the letter K in words that it has taken from other languages, and all the Spanish words that BEGIN with the letter K (as well as the letters W and X) are words that Spanish took from other languages.

Here is a photo of the lone page — which is only a partial page — in my large Spanish-English Larousse dictionary of all the Spanish words that begin with the letter K (at the time of the printing of this particular dictionary, that is).

As you can see, there aren’t very many of them. “Kindergarten” is in there, spelled the very same way we spell it because we both took it from German.

Notice there are two entries for our word “khaki.” In Spanish, it can be “kaki” or “kaqui.” This word came from a Persian word for “dust.” A Persian word for a “portico” gave us “kiosk,” which is “kiosco” in Spanish, and you can see Japanese’s influence in “karate” and “kimono” in both languages and an Australian tongue that gave us both the word “koala.”

We don’t tend to measure things with the “kilo” unit, but that would be common in Spanish. The French first created the word, but they adapted a Greek one to do so. If you visit any of the Spanish-speaking countries, you’ll need to know distance in “kilόmetros.”

The first time I heard the word “kindergarten” being used in Mexico was on a trip with other Spanish teachers to Mexico City the summer after my very first year of teaching, so I was only 22 years old. We visited a “kindergarten” language class, and I remember thinking it was so strange that they used that word and saying something to another teacher about that. She reminded me that we use the word even though it’s of German origin, so why shouldn’t other languages do the same?

If you’d like to read a concise, yet informative, history of “kindergarten,” here is a link to one: Kindergarten's beginnings

I mentioned above that you’ll also rarely find any true Spanish words that begin with the letters W or X for the same reason that there are so few that begin with the letter K. In fact, in the same Larousse dictionary that I took the K page photo from, there are only 26 Spanish words that begin with a W and the same number that begin with the letter X. Thus, you won’t find me sharing cognate duos that begin with these three letters. Those letters exist in the Spanish alphabet simply to accommodate the spelling of certain words that came from other languages.

If you’re a free subscriber only, though, you have missed out on my posts about words like “horology,” “epitaph,” inundation,” and “tempest” lately, so please consider upgrading to Paid. Then you won’t miss a post, and you’ll have access to the full archive as well as to the audio versions of each.

Until next time.

Tammy Marshall

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cognatecognizance.substack.com/subscribe

I’ve been making my way through all the seasons of “Grey’s Anatomy” on Netflix these past few months, and while I always look away during the gruesome parts, watching it often reminds me of my teaching years. When some of my advanced Spanish students would opt to take the Anatomy and Physiology (A&P) class, they’d often come to my class exclaiming about the useful overlap of the two subjects because so much of the terminology in that science class is comprised of cognates of words they’d already learned from me or of ones that would come up later in my class because the words all came from Latin.

anatomy — there are many definitions for this word, but let’s just say it’s a “branch of the biological sciences that deals with the structure of organisms” and for the purposes of this post, that organism is the human body.

anatomía — the Spanish cognate of the same meaning/s

The obsolete definition of “anatomy” is “a body dissected or to be dissected” and that is because the Latin anatomia means “dissection.” To learn about the structure of the human body, to study its “anatomy,” we do need to look inside, and the only way to do that is through dissection, so from that original meaning and use of the word, it evolved to its current meaning and many others — one of those meanings is essentially “the art of dissection.”

Here are some of the common Spanish cognate anatomical terms. See if you can figure them out — I’m sure you can.

arteria

vena

pulmonar

músculo

diafragma

estόmago

clavícula

bronquial

miocardio

duodeno

páncreas

uréter

I could go on and on, and I certainly didn’t teach all of these words in my Spanish class, but I did cover “pulmόn” for “lung” and “estόmago” for “stomach” during my body parts lessons. “Músculo” for “muscle” tended to come up in the exercise sections of the vocabulary lessons.

It’s useful for anyone who wants to be a doctor to have a working knowledge of Latin since so many of the words associated with the body come from that language. That’s a very difficult language to master and isn’t offered in many high schools across the country, so the next best choice is to study a language that came from Latin. Spanish, of course, is a great option and the one you’ll find offered in most high schools. Italian, with its roots firmly planted in the heart of what was the Roman Empire, is probably a better option, but it’s not commonly taught in high schools in the United States.

If I take that same list of Spanish cognates from above and put them in Italian, we get these:

arteria

vena

polmonare

muscolo

diaframma

stomaco

clavicola

bronchiale

miocardio

duodeno

pancreas

uretere

You can see that some of these are the same as they are in Spanish, and one is the same as we use in English. The beauty of cognates at work, making learning all those medical terms just a little easier for those who have studied Latin, Spanish, Italian, or another Romance language.

And if you find yourself in a Spanish-speaking country and in need of medical attention, you just might be able to pick up a little of what you hear the medical staff saying about you, or you might be able to explain a few things yourself.

Here is a photo from my old Spanish-English dictionary. Check your guesses about the words I listed above and look for other cognates or words you might recognize.

This is the 208th post of “Cognate Cognizance,” I believe, and I would like to hear from you. I’ve tried offering weekly posts to my many free subscribers and including extra information for the few paying subscribers, and I’ve tried offering only monthly posts to my free subscribers and weekly posts to the paying ones — only the paying subscribers have access to the audio versions no matter how often I send out the posts, and paying subscribers have full access to all 207 previous archived posts.

So, would you, as a free subscriber, prefer to receive weekly posts with extra information for the paying subscribers, or do you prefer just to receive monthly posts like this one? Please comment or send me a message. Thanks.

Paying subscribers can comment or message me, too, and let me know if there’s anything else you’d care to learn about Spanish and Italian cognates from me. I have the option to offer video recordings instead of audio, too, so let me know if that’s something you’d like me to try.

Thanks for being here.

Until next time.

Tammy Marshall

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cognatecognizance.substack.com/subscribe

Italy’s Mount Etna, a famous volcano situated in Sicily, is in the news today because it has been shooting a large amount of ash and lava into the air. Perhaps it’s no wonder that the Romans, who lived in that part of the world, created a god of fire and made his home under a volcano.

His name was Vulcan, also written as Volcanus, and from that name came the Italian word for volcano.

volcano — I doubt I need to define this, but the dictionary definition is this: a vent in the crust of the earth or another planet or a moon from which usually molten or hot rock and steam issue.

vulcano — the Italian cognate

volcán — the Spanish cognate

English borrowed the word directly from Spanish and Italian around about the year 1665.

I distinctly remember one day many years ago when I was in Mexico seeing my friend and we were driving down the road in Merida, and I saw a sign similar to the one pictured below:

At the time, I had no idea that I was looking at a cognate, “vulcanization.” I simply had never heard of the word and knew nothing about it. I asked my friend what “vulcanizaciόn” meant, and she looked at me like I was an idiot. While she didn’t know exactly what the process was either, she knew it had to do tires and that all the tire places had that word on them. Sure enough, once I’d seen one, I began to see the “vulcanizaciόn” signs at every tire place throughout the city and in other towns we visited as well.

The definition for “vulcanization” is this: the process of chemically treating a natural or synthetic polymer and especially rubber to give it useful properties (such as elasticity, strength, and stability) — things you want your tires to have!

I’m sure you’ve already realized that this word comes from the Roman god of fire, Vulcan, and not something from Spock’s homeland. As merriam-webster.com explains, “vulcanization in its simplest form consists of heating rubber with sulfur in order to improve the rubber's qualities. The Roman god Vulcan (whose Greek counterpart is Hephaestus) was the god of fire and of skills that used fire, such as metalworking. So when Charles Goodyear discovered that high heat would result in stronger rubber, he called the process "vulcanization" after the god of fire. Goodyear developed the idea in 1839 and acquired a patent for it in 1844.”

We have a verb which is “to vulcanize” that is “vulcanizar” in Spanish.

The science that deals with the study of volcanoes is called both “volcanology” and “vulcanology,” and the scientists can be called “volcanologists” or “vulcanologists.” In Spanish, that science is “vulcanología” and in Italian, it is the same, but without the written accent mark. In Spanish, the scientist is a “vulcanόlogo” for a male and “vulcanόloga” for a female, and in Italian, they are the same, also, minus the written accent marks. (My own word for someone who chooses to study volcanoes up close and personal would probably be something else!)

The adjective, “volcanic,” becomes “volcánico” to describe masculine things in Spanish and “volcánica” to describe feminine things. The Italian cognate retains the letter “u” and is “vulcanico” and “vulcanica.”

“A volcanic eruption” becomes “una erupciόn volcánica” in Spanish and “un'eruzione vulcanica” in Italian. You can see that “eruption” is also a cognate, but we’ll cover that word another time.

This is the free post for June. If you’re a paying subscriber, you have access to the recorded version as well, which is available on Spotify, too. Upgrade to paid status to have full access to the archive of more than 200 entries also and to receive these posts weekly instead of monthly. It’s only a few dollars a month. Thank you.

Tammy Marshall

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cognatecognizance.substack.com/subscribe

After being diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes, my boyfriend has discovered the “salutary” effects of a very strict diet that is keeping his blood sugar numbers low without insulin injections.

salutary — an adjective to describe something that promotes health or is curative

saludable — the Spanish adjective cognate of the same meaning that typically simply translates to “healthy”

Our word of “health” and its adjective “healthy” come to us from Old English, so we tend to use these words instead of those that hearken from Latin, but “salutary,” and some other words that may surprise you, come from the Latin word meaning “health” — salus.

In Spanish, the word for “health” is “salud.” People use this word often, especially after someone sneezes. “Achoo!” “Salud.” It’s basically a way of blessing you with health the same way we simply say “Bless you” or “Gesundheit” as I was brought up hearing by my German family — “Gesundheit” is simply a German word for “health.”

I think English speakers in the U.S. would chuckle if I simply said “Health!” after someone sneezed, but that’s what Spanish speakers and German speakers say, and there are probably other languages who do the same thing.

When teaching Spanish for those 30 years, my students would eventually catch on to the word “salud” simply because they heard it so often; after all, teenagers are full of germs, so there was a lot of sneezing in the classroom. Thus, when the word “saludable” came up in their vocabulary lists, they were able to associate it with “salud” and remember it fairly easily.

It wouldn’t have been much of a benefit for them to associate it to the word “salutary” because that word isn’t used very often in English — we simply use “healthy.” However, it does exist, and it is a cognate to “saludable” as is the word “salubrious” which is basically a synonym of “salutary” and comes from the same Latin root. Merriam-Webster differentiates between those two words by saying that “salubrious” is used more to describe the healthy benefits of climate and air, so it’s a good word to use at this time of year when the weather is finally nice, and “salutary” is used to describe healthy benefits that may be unpleasant, so that definitely describes the strict diet of my boyfriend, but he’s adapting to it well even though he misses his sweets.

Another very common Spanish word is “saludos,” which means “greetings.” What’s another word for “greetings” in English that would be a cognate of this word? If you’ve ever read “Charlotte’s Web,” you should know.

The word “salutations” comes from the same Latin word as “salutary.” When we greet people, we should be doing it in a positive way in which we bestow our best wishes upon them, including the desire that they be healthy.

The word “saludo” translates to “greeting” (a word we also got from Old English), but it also translates to “salute.” A “salute” is a sign of respect, and if you respect someone, you want that person to have good health. The verb “to greet” is “saludar,” and that word also translates to the verb “to salute.”

Another synonym for “salutary” is “salutiferous,” but I believe that word is even more rarely used than “salutary” in English. Whether you use “salutary,” “salubrious,” or “salutiferous” in English, though, the Spanish cognate for each is “saludable,” an adjective that typically just translates to “healthy,” but aren’t those other three words more fun?

Until next time. This is the free post for May. Please consider upgrading to “paid” status, so you can receive these posts weekly instead of monthly and so you gain access to the audio recording of each as well as the full archive of around 240 posts. It’s only a handful of dollars each month. Thank you.

Until next time.

Tammy Marshall

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cognatecognizance.substack.com/subscribe

Later this month is Easter, so this month’s free post and cognate duo pertain to that holy day, and I’m adding a second duo about the name of the month.

Pascha — a lesser-known word meaning “Easter” or “Passover”

Pascua — the Spanish cognate of the same meaning/s

These words entered Latin from Greek which got its word from Hebrew’s pesach, which translates to “skipping” or “passing over.” These words go back to the story of the Israelites who marked their doors with the blood of lambs so that the angel of death would pass over their homes and spare their first-born children.

The word evolved and changed, as all words do, to become today’s “Pascha” or even “Pasch” in English and “Pascua” in Spanish. While we much more commonly use the word “Easter” (because it comes to us from Old English), the word “Pascua” is what is used in Spanish. Thus, it can be difficult for English speakers to learn and remember that word when studying Spanish because it bears no similarity to our word of “Easter.” However, if you know “Pascha” then you can easily learn “Pascua,” and if you can remember “Pascua,” then you can easily learn and add “Pascha” to your English vocabulary.

There’s that Cognate Cognizance in action!

The adjective form of the word is “paschal” — as in a “paschal lamb” or even a “paschal bunny?” In Spanish, that is “pascual.”

Oddly enough, in English the word “pascual” also exists; however, it means “relating to or growing in pastures” and its etymology is different from “paschal.” Strange indeed. I guess that “paschal lamb” might have been born in a “pascual setting.”

I hope you enjoy your Pascha holiday and that the Paschal Bunny brings you some eggs or lots of candy. Ha ha.

This fourth month of the Gregorian calendar is called “April” in English and “abril” in Spanish. The exact etymology of these words isn’t known, but linguists tend to believe that the words come to us from Latin’s aperire which means “to open” because April is the time when flowers, like tulips, “open.” In Spanish, that verb is “abrir,” and you can see the connection between that verb and the word for the month — they are quite similar.

In English, we capitalize the names of our months, but in Spanish they do not, except when the month’s name is used as part of a special and recognized date. Today is April 7th, but in Spanish you would say “hoy es el siete de abril” and not capitalize the month’s name.

All of the month’s are cognates, making them easy to recognize and recall when learning Spanish. The Spanish word for “January” is “enero” — this doesn’t seem to be a cognate, but it is because they come from the same place. However, it’s the most difficult of the months to learn because it’s not as similar to its English cognate as the other eleven month names are: febrero, marzo, abril, mayo, junio, julio, agosto, septiembre, octubre, noviembre, diciembre.

They are cognates in the other Romance languages, too.

Until next time. Please upgrade to “paid” status, so you don’t have to wait until May (mayo, maggio, etc.) to receive your next “Cognate Cognizance.” Paying subscribers have access to the audio recordings of me reading each post, too, and they can read each of the past 240 posts are their leisure.

Tammy Marshall

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cognatecognizance.substack.com/subscribe

In George Eliot’s wonderful second novel, “The Mill on the Floss,” there is this sentence: “Certain seeds which are required to find a nidus for themselves under unfavorable circumstances have been supplied by nature with an apparatus of hooks, so that they will get a hold on very unreceptive surfaces.”

The book isn’t about farming; the sentence is metaphorically describing the spiritual seed that had been scattered over an obstinate, grumpy character. Within that sentence, however, is the word “nidus.” If I didn’t know Spanish as well as I know it, I wouldn’t have known what this English word was because it’s not a common word in English, but I immediately recognized it and understood it because of my own Cognate Cognizance.

nidus — in simplest terms, this is a “nest” for the eggs of insects, spiders, small animals, or it’s a breeding place or a place where something originates

nido — the Spanish word for “nest”

In English, we use the word “nest” because it comes to us from Old English whereas “nidus” and the Spanish word of “nido” come from Latin’s nidus meaning “nest.” Thus, it’s natural that we don’t use the word “nidus” very often, preferring the word “nest” instead with its roots in Old English.

When we do use “nidus,” it tends to have a more negative connotation and is used to refer to a breeding ground and originating place for bacteria. Yuck.

As I write this, I see numerous red-breasted robins hopping all over my yard in search of food and possibly looking for dry grass and twigs to begin building their own “nidi” or “niduses.” The verb that means “to build a nest” is “nidulate.” That word is “nidular” in Spanish. The noun that refers to nest building is “nidulation” which is “nidulaciόn.”

In all honesty, until reading that sentence in “The Mill and the Floss,” I had no idea the word “nidus” existed in English. If I had, I would have shared it with my students because I had a copy of “Are You My Mother?” in Spanish, and the word “nido” appears often in it, so it was a word that I taught my students to recognize and a word that I became very familiar with in Spanish.

Once again, the power of Cognate Cognizance to improve your lexicon in one language because of your knowledge of another has come through for me. I’ll share another word from this novel next week.

Until then. Because I know I have some Spanish teachers among my free subscribers as well as a couple new free subscribers, I’m sending this out to everyone this week, but please upgrade to “paid” to not miss a week and to be able to access the audio recording of each episode. Thanks.

Tammy Marshall

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cognatecognizance.substack.com/subscribe

levitation — a noun meaning “a rising or lifting in the air” — especially when it involves lifting someone in the air by supernatural means

levitaciόn — the Spanish cognate of the same meaning

When learning Spanish, one of the common verbs you will encounter is the verb “levantar,” which means “to lift.” The expression “levantar pesas” is “to lift weights,” and it comes up fairly early in vocabulary units centered on exercise. Later on, when learning about reflexive verbs, you’ll come upon “levantarse,” which means “to get up,” or quite literally “to lift oneself.”

In my 30 years of teaching Spanish, I saw students struggle to learn this verb because they didn’t see any relationship between it and the English verb of “to lift,” and they really didn’t see any connection between it and “to get up,” but when I could get them to think about the act of “levitating” and what it entails, they could much more easily recall and eventually learn the verb “levantar.”

“Levitate,” “levitation,” and “levantar” all come from Latin’s levis, meaning “light” as in weight or significance, not as in the opposite of dark. Another word of ours that is related to all of these is “levity,” which is a “frivolous lightness of manner” and is a term used most often to point out that something, such as a serious subject, shouldn’t be treated with such levity.

Knowing the connection to “light,” one can then easily learn the word “leve” in Spanish. This word describes something “mild.”

Since these words have the connection to lifting or raising, it may not surprise you to know that the word “lever” also comes to us from Latin’s levis, and more specifically from the Latin verb levare, which means “to lift.” “Lever” does not have a cognate in Spanish, however, but in Italian, the word is “leva.”

Perhaps you’ve now realized the connection to our word “elevate,” which simply means “to raise,” or “to lift higher.” That verb is “elevar” in Spanish, and an “elevator” is an “elevador,” but more commonly, it’s called an “ascensor” in Spanish because it’s a device that helps you go up or ascend.

The more your cognate cognizance improves, the more you elevate your lexicon in English as well as in Spanish (and other Romance languages), and you don’t have to have supernatural powers of levitation to do so.

Until next time. Consider upgrading to paid status, so you can listen to each episode and so you can receive these weekly instead of monthly. Thanks.

Tammy Marshall

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cognatecognizance.substack.com/subscribe