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Are "here", "there", and "where" morphological cognates, or just an orthographic coincidence?

tchrist
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Rachel
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    The h/th/wh- set also combine with -ither and -ence not just with -ere, so yes, it’s more than coincidence. – tchrist Apr 03 '17 at 00:52
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    It's part of a very old paradigm. In fact, it's such a prototype that I made a puzzle out of it to show students what paradigms are and how to construct them. (though I notice there's a mistake in the ablative plural in the example; ah, well :-) – John Lawler Apr 03 '17 at 02:00
  • 66% duplicate: http://english.stackexchange.com/a/286292/191178 – Laurel Apr 03 '17 at 02:36
  • It's actually the common " -here" that I was wondering about, because of the semantic connection that "there", "where" and "here" all refer to location. – Rachel Apr 04 '17 at 00:50

2 Answers2

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"here", "there", and "where" are indeed morphological cognates because they form the structure of the sentence. Whenever these are used they are either a result of query whose base are these or either the answer of query. So it is more than just a orthographic co-incidence since "here", "there", and "where" form the basic structure and of the sentence.

Moiz Nadeem
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Given that this is shown in many Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, I would not call this phenomenon an 'orthographic coincidence'. Example, in Sanskrit:
'atra'- here
'tatra'- there
'kutra'- where

Meghavarshini Krishnaswami
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