Flammable or Inflammable? And Other Word Pairs That Share a Root
Language is often a reflection of cultural evolution, and sometimes we can trace these linguistic changes through cognates — words that share a common ancestry but have diverged, whether across different languages or within the same language. Take, for example, the English word “paper” and the French word papier, both
derived directly from the Latin term papyrus. These words are examples of traditional cognates: terms that stem from the same root word but have evolved in different languages. Cognates can also exist within the same language. When this happens, they are called etymological twins or doublets. These pairs evolved from...
