Genial: A Language Mystery

Mini-Linguistics Lesson:
Cognates: words in different languages that mean the same thing. Example: fish, poisson, and pesce are cognates in English, French and Italian. Ok, now we can move on. :)

Last night as I was looking at my newest Flickr contact's photos I realized that "genial" does not mean the same thing in Spanish as it does in English. In Spanish it means 'brilliant', but in English I have always known it mean 'agreeable'. If you meet a genial person, you probably will like them since they are easy to get along with- they're a nice person. I couldn't understand how the two words could be so much the same, but have different meanings. Why weren't they cognates?

Upon further investigation I discovered that the English word 'genial' has about five meanings, with only three still in usage:

Merriam-Webster Definition:
1obsolete : of or relating to marriage or generation genial bed — John Milton>
2obsolete : inborn , native
3 a: favorable to growth or comfort : mild <genial sunshine>
b: marked by or diffusing sympathy or friendliness genial host>
4: displaying or marked by genius
or
: of or relating to the chin

So the fourth one makes sense now, but I decided to find out where the roots lie. It comes from the Latin genialis which comes from the Latin genius which comes from the Latin root gignere...
So to make a long blog short, 'genial' came from these roots:

• 'beget, produce' (gignere)
• 'guardian spirit who watches over someone from birth, wit, talent' (genius)
• 'pleasant festive' (genialis) but literally it pertains to 'marriage rites'

It seems that there was a convergence in all of these root words when it came to the English language.

Here are the meanings for the word 'genial' in Romance languages:

Italian- genial = gioviale (sound like jovial to anyone?)
Portuguse- genial = brilliant
Spanish- genial = brilliant or great, pleasant, or in character
French- génial = brilliant or great
Romanian- genial = brilliant, great or gifted

English seems to be the language that made such a mess of it all. All the Romance languages but Italian takes on 'brilliant' as the only meaning. What I find interesting is that the spelling stayed the same for all of these languages.

In the investigation I was doing I found some English words that are related to 'genial'.
Congenial, genius, genuine, benign, indigenous. For more check out gignere.

Now, don't take this as the complete research for this word. This only took me about an hour! And I have only consulted online sources. This is a digression from what I should actually be studying. but it isn't actually that different. I should be writing notes about language families and genetic relations. So, I'm not that far off!