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In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language.[1]
Each set of cognate word constitute a word family and the vast majority of english word families is of latin discent (formally more than 80%), being latin the language that in the classical era fully absorbed the greek language which had been the language of the first european scientific development
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Because language change can have radical effects on both the sound and the meaning of a word, cognates may not be obvious, and it often takes rigorous study of historical sources and the application of the comparative method to establish whether lexemes are cognate. Cognates are distinguished from loanwords, where a word has been borrowed from another language.
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