Learning Words by Common Descent

English-Spanish cognates

English and Spanish inherit much of their vocabulary from Latin, and many an English word has a Spanish counterpart sharing a common ancestor. These word-pairs are called cognates.

Many cognates are comprehensible even if you have not studied Spanish at all. For example, consider this excerpt from a Wikipedia article, Cultura maya:

"La historia de la civilización maya se divide en tres períodos principales: el Preclásico, Clásico y Posclásico"

You may recognize these terms:

(Press the ▶ button next to a word to hear your device read it.)

Cognates help us bootstrap comprehension of Spanish using our existing knowledge of English. However, productive language use, i.e. writing or speaking, is more difficult than comprehension. Even if we easily recognize a word while reading, we may have difficulty recalling it while speaking.

As languages evolve, words undergo sound changes, replacing one speech sound with another. These changes cause cognates to drift apart over time. However, sound changes are often systematic, and studying them gives us a way to group words for easier study, or, in some cases, to predict the form of a cognate we have never seen before.

In this article we have collected 12 productive rules, each accompanied by many examples. By learning these rules, and which English words they apply to, you may learn a large selection of Spanish vocabulary more easily than if you were to memorize each word separately.