[LINK] "Why the ‘Coffee’ Words Are Not Cognates"

[rfmcdonald]

Languages of the World's Asya Perelstvaig provides an entertaining look into the world of linguistics by looking at the definition of a "cognate", looking to coffee. (Coffee.)

A former student of mine drew my attention to a recent article in Slate written by Alyssa Pelish and titled “The Stimulating History of Coffee: Why You Hear This Word Around the World” (the image on the left is reproduced from the article). Pelish starts with a little thought-experiment about how one would order a coffee while travelling around the world: Kaffee in Berlin, caffè in Rome, kofi in Lagos, Nigeria, kŏfī in Delhi, India, and кофе (pronounced /’kofè/) in St. Petersburg, Russia. She correctly points out that these words sound alike in many languages, describing these words very poetically as “the two reliable syllables, the seesaw of vowel sounds punctuated by velar stops and fricatives”. I am not sure about the reliability of syllables or how one would go about measuring it, or whether the alternating consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (CVCV) pattern can be called a “seesaw”. But the explanation Pelish provides for why these ‘coffee’ words are so similar the world over is entirely wrong and ignorant.

She claims that the recognizable nature of the different words for ‘coffee’ that one might hear around the world is due to the fact that they are cognates. She writes: “These are words that share the same root, and, often enough, they’re a good indication that two languages developed from a common ancestor”. In the next paragraph, she adds:

“But one of the tricky things about cognates—true cognates—is that they aren’t always an indication that two languages share a common ancestor”.

I had to re-read this sentence several times to make sure the negation is really there because the sentence would be perfect if the little “n’t” weren’t there. The one tricky thing about cognates—which all too many researchers and journalists mess up—is that they always are an indication that two languages share a common ancestor. In fact, that is precisely the definition of cognates, which one can easily find in any introductory textbook if one desires to provide one’s readers with correct and well-informed stories: cognates are words from different languages that share a common ancestor.

The word that Pelish should have used is “look-alikes”. Or perhaps more precisely “sound-alikes”. As she later admits, “coffee is a loan word. That is, it was borrowed, fully formed, from another language”. But that’s just it: loanwords are not cognates! Sometimes it is hard to recognize loanwords as distinct from cognates, especially if the loanword comes from a closely related language. But that does not make all words that “share the same root” cognates. Nor is the use of the term “cognates” in connection to ‘coffee’ words in the above-cited passage an isolated instance in this article[.]