Talk:Irish/Similar words in English and Irish

The claim
 * Cognates are words that are generally the same in both spelling and pronunciation between languages

is not in accordance with the ordinary use of the world "cognate", to put it mildly. In general, linguists do not demand that cognates should retain the same meaning, and do not demand that their modern forms should be recognisable as related for anyone without any knowledge of the historical development of the languages in question.

The list in this book mostly seems to contain fairly recently borrowed words (in Irish and English, or in at least one of them), which therefore have not had the time to change.

On the other hand, cognates, which both Irish and English have inherited from their common Proto-Indoeuropean origin, are absent. This includes examples such as Irish ceathair and English four, where the meaning has been kept intact through the millennia; but also such cases as the Irish bean (Old Irish ben), which has kept the original Proto-Indoeuropean sense "woman" (and the possibly equally old second sense "wife"), while its two (closely related) English cognates quean and queen have acquired new meanings (signifying rather special women - but in rather different directions).

I think that this list as it is has a value, but that its name should be reflected to show that it mainly is a list of relatively recently borrowed words, not "cognates" of the kind listed e.g. in the etymologies in the Oxford English Dictionary. JoergenB (discuss • contribs) 20:28, 21 March 2015 (UTC)