Global Cognates for Alcohol
Global Cognates for Alcohols Today, you can buy some form of whiskey almost anywhere in the world where alcohol is sold. The same goes for rum and vodka. And the names often follow, giving rum and whisky more than 80 and 100 found cognates respectively. That being said there’s something interesting happening with terms for vodka. Along an area known as ‘The Vodka Belt’ (Central Asia, Southern Russia, and the Caucasus), languages very often have a non-cognate term for vodka, often (though not always) related to the term araq . Despite having at least 10 languages where a cognate term looks unlikely, vodka still had more than 75 cognates found. Incidentally, araq wasn’t too far behind with 62 found cognates. Cognates for ‘gin’ and ‘champagne’ were also looked into but the numbers were much lower. Language Family rum vodka whisky, whiskey Spanish Indo-European el ron la vodka, el vodka el whisky French Indo-European le rhum la vodka le whisky Portuguese Indo-European ...