Re: joatsimeo-Loan Words

S.M. Sterling wrote:
-- you can generally tell whether it's a loan-word or a cognate by
whether it
follows the rules of sound development in the language concerned.

Eg., in English we have "cow" and "bovine".

They're both derivatives of PIE *gwous, but in the Germanic languages
PIE
*gw- invariably ends up as a "k", so obviously "bovine" is a loan-word
(and
from some other Indo-European language).

As it turns out, it's from Latin... but the Latin word (bos) is itself
a
loan, because in Latin PIE *gw- becomes "v". (which would give "vos").
Probably a loan from Oscan, a related Italic dialect.

Likewise, the Germanic word for "iron" is a loan-word from Celtic, and
it
undergoes the first series of sound-shifts in Germanic, which enables
us to
date those shifts. (Post-700 BCE.)

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Hi S.M. (is this how you like to be addressed?)

Thanks for the reply. Sounds very logical and very sound. It
certainly seems that the words you identify through this process
probably are loan words. But does that mean that all the remainder of
related/similiar words are then assumed to be cognates?

What I am trying to get at, is when does a linguist know for certain
he/she has words that indicate a derivative relationship, in the sense
of ancestoral language to child language?

In reflecting on word origin it seemed to me that words can be
introduced from other societies that would not be visible as loan
words, either because the sounds were not involved one of these
conversions you indicated above - or because the new langauge either
did not have the constant or vowel, or was they were uncomfortable with
one and picked one that fit their pronounciation better.

In other words, do linguists assume that all words not identified as
loan words using the process above are cognates or do they have an
additional filtering process a candidate word must go through?

Brent