I'm a young sergeant and this week I have a quick and dirty tear about word families,

a tidbit about the word caucus, and a few shout outs to some far-flung listeners.

Let's get started.

Jennifer Schoels asked an interesting question on the Grammar Girl Facebook page last week.

She wrote,

is there a specific term for words that share the same root?

Words like education, educating, and uneducated, a friend asked me and I can't seem to find one.

Well I didn't immediately know the answer either, but other people on the page pointed

me in a few different directions for research, and now I have an answer.

A group of words like this that all share the same root are called word families.

But a bunch of people also suggested the word cognates, which gets a little more complicated.

Merriam Websters online dictionary defines a word family as a group of cognate words,

especially within a single language.

The most simple definition of cognates is words that share the same etymology,

and the words in a word family do share the same etymology.

But when you start reading about cognates, you find that when people actually use the word,

they're almost always talking about words from different languages that share the same etymology.

For example, the English word night and the German word knocked are cognates because they

have the same origin if you go all the way back to the very early language called Proto-Indo-European.

Other examples are the English word father and the French word pair and the English word history

and the Spanish word historia.

The existence of cognates makes some languages easier to learn than others.

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