salient — an adjective meaning that something is prominent or conspicuous or projects out, like a “salient nose”
saliente — the Spanish cognate of the same meaning, a “nariz saliente”
I’m going to admit that I didn’t know this word until I began teaching a Linguistics class about ten years ago. In that class, my primary focus was on increasing my students’ vocabularies by having them learn less-common words and the roots of those words, so they would begin to see the correlation between them and other words they already knew in English as well as in Spanish, if they’d ever taken one of my Spanish classes. That was where my love of studying cognates really began. While I’d always found them useful in Spanish class, they became something much more magical in my Linguistics class, and that’s where the idea for doing a book about cognates started. Thus, that’s where the idea for “Cognate Cognizance” began.
“Salient” is one of the first words I really remember being intrigued by. You could say it “jumped out” at me just like its ancestor, the Latin salire which means “to leap.”
In Spanish, the verb “salir” means “to go out,” like on a date with friends, but it still involves that aspect of “out.” The Spanish verb for “to leap” is “saltar,” by the way.
Knowing “salient” in English makes it very easy to learn and remember “saliente” in Spanish, and vice versa. While “salient” is most commonly used as an adjective, it can also be a noun when used to refer to a promontory, or to something that juts out.
Since these two cognates came to us from a Latin verb that refers to leaping and jumping out, it should be no surprise that the scientific term used for the order that contains frogs and toads is Salientia. Thus, the adjective “salientian” refers to creatures of that order.
Related words are “saliency” and “salience.” Both of these are nouns that simply mean “the state of being salient.” In Spanish, these usually translate to “prominencia,” which you probably can tell looks like “prominence,” or the quality of standing out.
Our word “outstanding” becomes “sobresaliente” in Spanish, which basically means that you are sticking out or leaping out at us above or over the heads of everyone else. Thus, you are “outstanding” at what you do. Finally knowing the word “salient” and then “saliente” helped me to firmly entrench that common Spanish word into my lexicon. Prior to learning “salient,” I had a heck of a time understanding the combination of “sobre” with “saliente” to get “outstanding.” Now, it all makes sense through the magic of “cognate cognizance.”
Until next time. Please share this with others who like learning about words, and encourage them to subscribe.
Tammy Marshall
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