English-French Cognates - You Know More French Than You Thought.

First off, what are Cognates? In linguistics terms, cognates are words that have a common origin.

Now, there are a lot of words in English that are cognates with French words. It's estimated that 60% of English words are actually French words. Most of them have a different spelling and nearly all of them are pronounced differently, but they're all French words.

Below is just a portion of the French words you already know.

All words in English ending in -tion are French words. Some examples are:

information, verification, acquisition, etc.

There are only 3 exceptions for this:
vacation -> vacances
explanation -> explication
translation -> traduction

All the English words ending in -able and -ible are French. Somes examples are:

-able:
admirable, passable, acceptable

-ible:
terrible, possible

There are also cognates for words that end in -ence. Some are changed to -ance in French though. Here are some examples:

violence, dependance, variance

This set of cognates covers 3 different ending as you can see. These are changed to çon. Here are some examples:

lesson -> leçon
fashion -> façon
mason -> maçon

One exception would be "person". That is written as "personne" in French.

The last set covered here are -ic and -ical cognates. Their ending is changed to -ique. Here are those examples:

music -> musique
economic -> economique
practical -> practique

This is just a small list of cognates. For a larger list visit the French-English Spelling Equivalents page at french.about.com. Later I will write up a better organized and more complete hub showing all the cognates; mostly because I think I found one that's not listed on french.about.com.