Cognate in a sentence as a noun

Words are cognate if they stem from a common root.

My favorite false cognate in German is "das Gift", which in English is in fact "poison".

The "dar" is from "dear", and the Swedish cognate for dear is "dry", which means "expensive" in modern Swedish.

So a "false cognate" actually would mean words that appear to have come from the same historical roots but don't really.

Plus, the fact that the term is actually an anti-cognate adds a third layer of irony, which is kind of cool in and of itself.

Words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages.

Cognate in a sentence as an adjective

I note that the writer has fallen into the trap of a false cognate - or, at least, a near-homonym - by writing "demure" when he/she meant "demur".

It's not hard to learn the difference, but the article's point in calling it a "false cognate" is just to note that there _is_ an unexpected difference.

I think there were about 20 or so common ones, and every single one has a cognate in Swedish that starts with an audible k, and same for words like gnat.

The original context the writer is most certainly French where actuel means current, however the usage generates a false cognate.

It defines an alias for true called otherwise, so it would beif x > y -> true; otherwise -> false; endUsing otherwise makes it a loss less ugly, and I guess fixes the false cognate.

Cognate definitions

noun

one related by blood or origin; especially on sharing an ancestor with another

noun

a word is cognate with another if both derive from the same word in an ancestral language

adjective

related in nature; "connate qualities"

See also: connate

adjective

having the same ancestral language; "cognate languages"

adjective

related by blood

See also: blood-related consanguine consanguineous consanguineal