Just looking at the above photo gives me “gustatory” delight, but until a few nights ago, I hadn’t heard this word. My boyfriend loves to watch cooking shows, and one of his favorites is “Beat Bobby Flay.” I was only halfway watching it, but Bobby spoke a sentence in which he used the word “gustatory.” One of Bobby’s celebrity hosts chuckled and repeated the word, and I experienced one of those mini-lightbulb epiphanies followed immediately by a figurative slap to my head and an interior monosyllabic monologue of “Duh.”
For years, I taught Spanish, and one of the most common verbs is the verb “gustar.” English speakers struggle with this verb for many reasons, one of which is that it doesn’t look anything like its English equivalent of “to like.” Hearing the word “gustatory” made me wish I’d heard it three decades ago.
First let’s look at our cognate duo:
gustation — a noun meaning “the act of tasting”
gustaciόn — the Spanish cognate of the same meaning
These words come from Latin’s gustare which means “to taste.” Over the years, though, the verb “gustar” in Spanish moved away from dealing with physical taste and into the realm of liking something, as in it is to your taste or your liking.
In Italian, “gustare” still pertains to tasting something, but in Spanish “gustar” translates into English as “to like” in the sense of “to be pleasing to” someone. Thus, in English when we say “I like the car,” it translates, essentially, to “the car is pleasing to me” in Spanish, and you get the construction of “Me gusta el carro” or “El carro me gusta.”
Due to the way the verb is used and the fact that it doesn’t look anything like our English word of “like” or even “please,” students really struggle with this verb even though it is VERY common in Spanish.
As soon as Bobby Flay used the word “gustatory,” though, I understood what he meant because of teaching the word “gustar” for so many years. I immediately knew he was referring to the taste of something he was preparing. It had “gustatory” appeal.
If you don’t find a particular food appealing to your tastebuds, you might call that food “disgusting.” Notice that root in the middle of the word? Yep, “disgust” is used to show that something does not have flavor or taste to us. “Disgusto” is the Spanish cognate.
“Gustatory” has a synonym of “gustative,” and both those words become “gustativo” in Spanish for the masculine adjective form and “gustativa” for the feminine adjective form. “It’s a gustatory/gustative sensation” becomes “Es una sensaciόn gustativa” in Spanish.
Do you like to learn cognates? ¿Te gusta aprender los cognados? I hope so, and I hope you’ll share this post with others and encourage them to subscribe. Please consider upgrading to paid subscriber, too, to ensure that you’ll receive “Cognate Cognizance” each week.
Until next time.
Tammy Marshall
Gustation