Wednesday 28 January 2009

Perfect cognates

There are so many words that come from German. Some words are identical in spelling and in meaning. The only difference with German nouns is that they have capital letters. These words are called perfect cognates. Der Arm, Die Hand, und der Finger are all examples of perfect cognates.

You also have near cognates where the spelling of the words are slightly different between the German and the English. We have seen some examples of near cognates with words like Bett and 'bed'. The link is the d and the t. Slight variations include lang which means long. Some are very easy to guess. There is no need to translate Die Musik ist perfekt.

I would encourage you to guess a translation but be careful of those falsche Freunde.

Bis bald

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