Editing Cognate (section)

==Characteristics==
Cognates need not have the same meaning, as they may have undergone [[semantic change]] as the languages developed independently. For example [[English language|English]] ''[[wikt:starve#English|starve]]'' and [[Dutch language|Dutch]] ''[[wikt:sterven#Dutch|sterven]]'' 'to die' or [[German language|German]] ''[[wikt:sterben|sterben]]'' 'to die' all descend from the same [[Proto-Germanic]] verb, ''[[wikt:Appendix:Proto-Germanic/sterbaną|*sterbaną]]'' 'to die'.

Cognates also do not need to look or sound similar: English ''[[wikt:father|father]]'', [[French language|French]] ''[[wikt:père#French|père]]'', and [[Armenian language|Armenian]] [[wikt:հայր|հայր]] (''hayr'') all descend directly from [[Proto-Indo-European language|Proto-Indo-European]] ''*ph₂tḗr''. An extreme case is Armenian [[wikt:երկու|երկու]] (''erku'') and English ''[[wikt:two|two]]'', which descend from [[Proto-Indo-European language|Proto-Indo-European]] ''*dwóh₁''; the sound change ''*dw'' > ''erk'' in Armenian is regular.

Paradigms of conjugations or declensions, the correspondence of which cannot be generally due to chance, have often been used in cognacy assessment.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Hetzron |first=Robert |date=1976-01-01 |title=Two principles of genetic reconstruction |url=https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/0024384176900747 |journal=Lingua |volume=38 |issue=2 |pages=89–108 |doi=10.1016/0024-3841(76)90074-7 |issn=0024-3841}}</ref> However, beyond paradigms, morphosyntax is often excluded in the assessment of cognacy between words, mainly because structures are usually seen as more subject to borrowing. Still, very complex, non-trivial morphosyntactic structures can rarely take precedence over phonetic shapes to indicate cognates. For instance, [[Tangut language|Tangut]], the language of the [[Western Xia|Xixia]] Empire, and one [[Horpa language|Horpa]] language spoken today in [[Sichuan]], Geshiza, both display a verbal alternation indicating tense, obeying the same morphosyntactic collocational restrictions. Even without regular phonetic correspondences between the stems of the two languages, the cognatic structures indicate secondary cognacy for the stems.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Beaudouin |first=Mathieu |date=2024-09-13 |title=Non-past and past verb stems in Tangut |url=https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/lali.00177.bea |journal=Language and Linguistics |language=en |volume=Online first |pages=1–21 |doi=10.1075/lali.00177.bea}}</ref>