Talk:Spanish 1/Linguistic characteristics

What's a cognate?

Please either explain what a cognate is, or don't use this technical term, or at least link to a definition. The wikipedia page has a decent definition, but I'd prefer one that doesn't have another technical term (I clicked through for the definition of etymological). Wiktionary has something decent (the beginning of the 4th definition in the noun section... says "ancestor language" instead of "etymological". -- JasonWoof 02:57, 31 December 2011 (UTC)