literature — I doubt this needs a definition, but essentially, it’s “the writings in prose or verse” of humankind

literatura — the Spanish cognate of the same meaning/s

Given my love of literature and the fact that I’m an author myself, I’m a bit embarrassed that I haven’t covered this cognate duo before, but better late than never as the old saying goes.

These words come from Latin’s littera which means “letter” as in letter of the alphabet. All “literature” comes from words, and when you go through the process of putting those spoken sounds down onto paper into some sort of visual form, you need individual letters. Putting those individual letters together into words and then into sentences and paragraphs, etc. is writing and from doing that, we get things to read or things that we can lump together under the category or definition of “literature.”

Essentially, “literature” is all those things that are made up of individual letters and meant for us to read. Nowadays, we can also listen to literature via audiobooks and the like and feel the words through Braille, but “literature” began when people first started putting their oral stories into written form and thus needed those magical little symbols called “letters.”

So, any word related to “literature” also hearkens back to that Latin word for “letter.”

Since it does, it will have a Spanish cognate as well as cognates in the other Romance languages.

“Literal” is simply “literal” in Spanish; “literary” is “literario” for masculine words and “literaria” for feminine ones; “literally” is “literalmente” because Spanish tends to use the -mente ending on adverbs where we use that -ly ending; “literality” is “literalidad” because Spanish uses that -dad ending on nouns where we use “-ity.”

If you are a “literate” person as in the sense of being “cultured, learned, educated,” then you are “una persona letrada.” If you simply mean that you can read, then you are “una persona alfabetizada.” I think you can see that the word for “literate” in the second Spanish example shows that the person knows his or her “alphabet” and thus can read but may or may not be “letrada” in the sense of being well read.

In Spanish, the word for “letter” is “letra.” It’s quite evident in the word “letrada,” which would be “letrado” for something masculine.

The next time you pick up a piece of “literature” to read it, take a moment to marvel at those little symbols that we call “letters.” The English alphabet has only 26 letters, but they combine to make hundreds of thousands of words and millions upon millions of pieces of literature. The Spanish alphabet has 27 or 30 letters, depending on whether you want to include the “ch” and the “ll” and the “rr” as separate letters or not — when I first learned the Spanish alphabet, I learned it with 30 letters.

I will say it for you now, but you’ll only hear it if you are listening to this via the attached podcast and not just reading it.

Until next time. This is the free “Cognate Cognizance” post for October. If you want to keep receiving this weekly instead of monthly, please upgrade to “paid” now. Being a “paid” subscriber gets you access to the full archive of all the past posts, and there are many now since I’ve been writing these for over 2 years.

Tammy Marshall

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