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

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