When learning Spanish, one of the early vocabulary units tends to cover words for basic body parts. A few of those words have fairly obvious English cognates, but some have lesser-known ones that not only can help you remember the Spanish words but can also improve your English lexicon in the process.

From the Latin word for “body” — corpus — we get the adjective that refers to things relating to the body — “corporal.” That word has an exact cognate in Spanish with a slightly different pronunciation — “corporal.” The word for “body” in Spanish is “cuerpo.”

The English word of “body” comes to us from Old English, but we use other words in English that come from that root Latin word and that refer to types of bodies. The word “corpse” once meant “a human or animal body whether living or dead” but now only refers to a dead body. A “corps” refers to any “organized body of individuals” as in a military group or the famous Corps of Discovery. Oddly enough the plural for “corps” is also “corps” but you pronounce the final “s” in the plural word. English! Ugh. Ha ha. Any “corporation” is also a “body” of some sort. That word is “corporaciόn” in Spanish.

Let’s look at some of the individual body parts — “partes del cuerpo” — now and their lesser-known English cognates.

On your face, you have two “cejas,” unless you prefer the hairy caveman look. Those are your eyebrows. Clearly, “ceja” and “eyebrow” look nothing alike. However, the word “ceja” exists in English in the American Southwest where the word is used to refer to “a jutting edge along the top of a mesa or upland plain.” We took that word straight from the Spanish word for “eyebrow” because the geographical feature juts out just like an eyebrow does.

Now, I’m going to tell you right now that for the entire 30 years in which I taught, I didn’t know this word was used in English, so don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of it either. In fact, I only discovered its use while watching the Scripps National Spelling Bee last week. “Ceja” was one of the words in the final round, and when they gave the definition, I immediately knew it was spelled just like the word for “eyebrow” in Spanish, and I was right. It was a surprisingly easy word to spell amidst all the incredibly difficult ones thrown at those kids. If you’ve never watched one of those spelling bees, you should because you’ll be astounded.

Let’s look at another cognate that I found while rereading “Moby Dick” recently. In it, the “naris” of the whale was mentioned. I knew right away that it was referring to the whale’s “nose” or a part of it because the word for “nose” in Spanish is “nariz.” While “nose” comes to us from the Old English word of nosu, it may have been influenced by Latin’s nasus. You can see the connection to our word of “nasal” which refers to things concerning the nose — in Spanish, that word is also “nasal.” A “naris” is “either of the pair of openings of the nose or nasal cavity,” and its plural is “nares.”

If something is described as being “labial,” it pertains to the lips. Now, when teaching teenagers, sometimes making this connection is risky because they jump immediately to the scientific terms they’ve learned for a lower part of a woman, and things can quickly spin into raucous chaos; however, the word “labial” refers to lips. If you use your lips to make a certain sound, that is a “labial sound.” I used to play the flute, and that’s a very “labial” instrument. The word for “lips” in Spanish is “labios.”

Our word of “hand” comes to us from Old English, but its Latin counterpart of manus gave us the word “manual” as well as the Spanish word for “hand” which is “mano.” If you do “manual labor” — which is simply “labor manual” in Spanish — then you use your hands (tus manos) to do the work. When you “manipulate” something, in its original sense, you use your hands to skillfully operate something; in Spanish, that word is “manipular.”

Do you wear a “ceinture” to keep your pants up? That’s just a fancy word we took from French to mean a “belt” that goes around your waist. The Spanish word for both “waist” and for “belt” is “cintura.” This word, and another English word for “belt” or “girdle” is “cincture.” These words all come from the Latin word for “girdle” which is cinctura.

Can you tell I’m working my way down the body? Let’s skip now to the bottom part of the body.

Our word is “foot” and it comes to us from Old English, but in Latin that root word is pes and also exists as ped- at the beginning of words that deal with “feet.” In Spanish, then, a “foot” is a “pie.” This is a false-cognate to an English speaker because it looks exactly like our word for a tasty dessert, but nobody (no sane person) wants a “pie” made from “pies.” Yuck. A “pedestal” is the “foot” or support of a column and is the same word in Spanish. If you use your feet and walk instead of drive, you are a “pedestrian.” The Greek used pod- instead of ped- to begin words dealing with “feet,” so that’s why a foot doctor is a “podiatrist.”

So many of the words we use for different body parts have come to us from Old English, so there aren’t a lot of cognates for them in Spanish, but the more you study the medical terminology for different body parts, the more you’ll see the connection with the Spanish words for those parts because so much of our medical terminology comes from Latin. “Brachial” refers to your arm, which is “brazo” in Spanish. “Pulmonary” deals with your lungs, which are “pulmones” in Spanish. “Cerebral” deals with your brain, which is “cerebro” in Spanish.

One more that is relevant to your Cognate Cognizance — if you are a “linguist,” you like words. How do we form words? How do we talk? We use our “tongues.” The word for “tongue” in Spanish is “lengua” which comes from Latin’s lingua meaning “tongue.”

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Until next time.

Tammy Marshall

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