Word Stories: aperture

Steve Taylore-Knowles looks at the stories behind the English language.

I just got back from a trip to Mexico, where I spoke at Mextesol's annual convention, this year held in Veracruz. Each time I go to Mexico, and am surrounded by Spanish, a language I don't yet speak beyond a few common phrases, I am struck by the role cognates play.

In a strict sense, pretty much all cognates are false cognates to a certain degree, since it's highly unlikely that a given word is used in the same way in all contexts in both languages. Still, even so-called 'false friends' can be firm allies in receptive understanding. For example, it doesn't take a genius to work out that edificio is the Spanish word for 'building' when you see it on the side of one of them, even though the English word edifice has a very limited set of uses.

And the level at which words are related may often not be apparent until you are sitting there staring at the word for five minutes. That's what happened to me while looking at the word abierto (open) on a door. It didn't seem to me to have an etymology related to an English word but suddenly it struck me. What about aperture? A noun rather than an adjective, and some of the letters are different, but I thought they were probably related. And it turned out to be the case. Both words come from the Latin verb aperire (to open), which had the past participle stem apert-, leading eventually to both the Spanish adjective and the English noun. Another word from the same root is aperitif, an alcoholic drink that ‘opens’ a meal.

We do our students a great favour when we develop in them a feel for relationships between languages that goes beyond the simple idea that there are cognates and there are 'false friends'. In fact, languages are related to each other in complex ways, and the more we can trace those threads, the better we develop our 'plurilingualism’, an important concept in the Common European Framework, where our knowledge of different languages is a key resource in developing our communicative competence.