We talked about friends or cognates in a recent post. It’s time to talk about acquaintance or indirect cognates,

If a cognate is a word that are similar in two languages, an indirect cognate is a word that you cannot recognize at first sight but only through a third word that resembles that of English. For example, the word toro doesn’t sound like “bull”, but with some inspection (imagination is important here), you can associate toro with “taurus,” the Zodiac sign, which is.. voila! bull.

You can´t expect to hear toro and imagine what it means, but this is a kind of word that, once you know the third party, you can memorize it easily and forever. By the way most Zodiac symbols are third parties of other words, like twins -gemini –gemelos.

The following is a list of indirect cognates. It is not complete, but it will give you an idea of how easy they are.

A last comment about indirect cognates is that there are many from English to Spanish (so, good news if you want to learn Spanish) but they are rare from Spanish to English. This is because it is rare to find Latin words in English that have been replaced by a non-Latin word in Spanish. An example is “spleen”, bazo, Spanish has the prefix espleno- “spleen related.”

To summarize, it’s worthwhile looking for connection between words and feeling fortunate.