The word lox was one of the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were, and where they lived.Photograph by Helen Cook / Flickr One of my favorite words is lox,” says Gregory Guy, a professor of linguistics at New York University. There is hardly a more quintessential New York food than […]
Correct me if I’m wrong, but English didn’t exist 8000 years ago. Olde English was synthesized from numerous Germanic dialects in the 5th century, which was about 1600 years ago. Not only that, but “lox” isn’t an English word, it’s Yiddish, and it wasn’t introduced into the English speaking world until 1934 when a wave of Jewish immigrants moved to Western Europe and North America.
Yes, English didn’t exist 8000 years ago. Instead, there was a language called Proto-Indoeuropean spoken on the steppes of Ukraine. Just like how Latin spread and local dialects slowly became Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, etc., PIE spread out and its descendants became Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, Latin, German, etc.
Part of what happened over time was sound shifts. For example, PIE p morphed into an f in Proto-Germanic. Father and the Latin word pater go back to the same PIE root word, but father exhibits the sound change of p -> f you saw in Germanic languages.
Similarly, Spanish has a sound change where f changed into h. So the Latin word fabulari (to chat) became hablar in Spanish and falar in Portuguese.
The point of the article is that the PIE word for salmon, laks, by random chance didn’t really morph much in Germanic languages. So you have lax, lox, lachs, etc.
Interestingly, the Old English word for salmon was leax, and that made its way into Middle English and early Modern English as lax. It died out in favor of the French-derived salmon, and then we borrowed lox back from Yiddish.
It’s like if beef entirely replaced cow, then we borrowed back koe or kuh from Dutch or German.
The islands would have something that eventually became (regional) Gaelic. But the Normans did a good job killing most of these people and replacing them with pale people
If people were there 8000 years ago, this part didn’t happen until your time period
I think it’s saying that it’s the oldest word that English speakers today use which might not be true
So looking it up, the Yiddish word comes from an old German word and is around 1000 to 1500 years old. This makes a lot more sense and is in the time period for when they started killing Gaelic people
Yes I read the article that claimed people lived on the steppes 8000 years ago, however I didn’t read any links between that and the word to which I went elsewhere and still didn’t find any links to the word to that time period but did find that it is less than 1500 years old
Anyone would be skeptic of this claim though given we don’t even know many Hittite words despite them having a writing system and being less than half that age
If you’d like to look up more about the origins of PIE, look up the Kurgan Hypothesis, which suggests that Proto-Indoeuropean originated on the steppes.
Basically everything we know about PIE, we know from looking at its descendants. If a word appears in multiple unrelated branches, it’s probably from the common ancestor. Particularly if there’s consistent sound changes on one or more branches.
For example, it seems that a lot of PIE words with a p morphed into f in germanic languages. So, given the English father, Dutch Vader, Old Saxon fadar, Latin pater, Sanskrit pitar, Old Persian pita, etc. we can figure out that father goes back to some original PIE word which was probably something like pəter.
Similarly, we see similar words for salmon both in Germanic and Slavic. And in the extinct Tocharian language, the word for fish in general was laks. Lox originating only 1500 years ago means that the Slavic and Tocharian would be a pretty strange coincidence.
So the article makes no links between the word and the theory
It just says it’s the oldest word and cites the theory
Not only do I point out that it’s an impossible connection but also through outside research find that it’s wrong
So your response is to just rehash the article and even your example doesn’t fit with this word 1. Because it is impossible to say it’s the oldest word without written proof and evolving from another would disqualify it from being the oldest word 2. Somewhere between 8000 years ago and 2000 years ago the word disappeared and came back with supposedly the same pronunciation and spelling that we haven’t any proof of except from as you said “many languages use it today…even if they’ve been mingling the last 2000 years”
Come on, even if we say it comes from the word Lak or Lakos. Why would you draw that to salmon over say… lake? And why would you say that’s pronounced the same…but but Lax means salmon as well and that’s closer, of course there’s regional differences in spelling
That still isn’t any proof, take any modern word that is shares between languages, it disproves your whole widely accepted theory doesn’t it? Does the similarities of Pizza show there was one language 8000 years ago that branched out? Or does it prove that these people have been in contact with each other for the last hundred? If we assume it was one people then it must be even older because Koreans use the same word and that’s even further away
Be realistic, there is no basis for what you are saying
Correct me if I’m wrong, but English didn’t exist 8000 years ago. Olde English was synthesized from numerous Germanic dialects in the 5th century, which was about 1600 years ago. Not only that, but “lox” isn’t an English word, it’s Yiddish, and it wasn’t introduced into the English speaking world until 1934 when a wave of Jewish immigrants moved to Western Europe and North America.
Yes, English didn’t exist 8000 years ago. Instead, there was a language called Proto-Indoeuropean spoken on the steppes of Ukraine. Just like how Latin spread and local dialects slowly became Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, etc., PIE spread out and its descendants became Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, Latin, German, etc.
Part of what happened over time was sound shifts. For example, PIE p morphed into an f in Proto-Germanic. Father and the Latin word pater go back to the same PIE root word, but father exhibits the sound change of p -> f you saw in Germanic languages.
Similarly, Spanish has a sound change where f changed into h. So the Latin word fabulari (to chat) became hablar in Spanish and falar in Portuguese.
The point of the article is that the PIE word for salmon, laks, by random chance didn’t really morph much in Germanic languages. So you have lax, lox, lachs, etc.
Interestingly, the Old English word for salmon was leax, and that made its way into Middle English and early Modern English as lax. It died out in favor of the French-derived salmon, and then we borrowed lox back from Yiddish.
It’s like if beef entirely replaced cow, then we borrowed back koe or kuh from Dutch or German.
Try reading it differently.
It’s a really old word (oldest) that is currently used in the English language.
Basically
The islands would have something that eventually became (regional) Gaelic. But the Normans did a good job killing most of these people and replacing them with pale people
If people were there 8000 years ago, this part didn’t happen until your time period
I think it’s saying that it’s the oldest word that English speakers today use which might not be true
So looking it up, the Yiddish word comes from an old German word and is around 1000 to 1500 years old. This makes a lot more sense and is in the time period for when they started killing Gaelic people
8k years ago, the distant ancestor of English was spoken on the steppes of Ukraine.
Their word for salmon was laks.
That became the English lox, Swedish lax, German lachs, Lithuanian lašiša, Russian losos, and Polish łosoś.
Yes I read the article that claimed people lived on the steppes 8000 years ago, however I didn’t read any links between that and the word to which I went elsewhere and still didn’t find any links to the word to that time period but did find that it is less than 1500 years old
Anyone would be skeptic of this claim though given we don’t even know many Hittite words despite them having a writing system and being less than half that age
If you’d like to look up more about the origins of PIE, look up the Kurgan Hypothesis, which suggests that Proto-Indoeuropean originated on the steppes.
Basically everything we know about PIE, we know from looking at its descendants. If a word appears in multiple unrelated branches, it’s probably from the common ancestor. Particularly if there’s consistent sound changes on one or more branches.
For example, it seems that a lot of PIE words with a p morphed into f in germanic languages. So, given the English father, Dutch Vader, Old Saxon fadar, Latin pater, Sanskrit pitar, Old Persian pita, etc. we can figure out that father goes back to some original PIE word which was probably something like pəter.
Similarly, we see similar words for salmon both in Germanic and Slavic. And in the extinct Tocharian language, the word for fish in general was laks. Lox originating only 1500 years ago means that the Slavic and Tocharian would be a pretty strange coincidence.
So the article makes no links between the word and the theory
It just says it’s the oldest word and cites the theory
Not only do I point out that it’s an impossible connection but also through outside research find that it’s wrong
So your response is to just rehash the article and even your example doesn’t fit with this word 1. Because it is impossible to say it’s the oldest word without written proof and evolving from another would disqualify it from being the oldest word 2. Somewhere between 8000 years ago and 2000 years ago the word disappeared and came back with supposedly the same pronunciation and spelling that we haven’t any proof of except from as you said “many languages use it today…even if they’ve been mingling the last 2000 years”
Come on, even if we say it comes from the word Lak or Lakos. Why would you draw that to salmon over say… lake? And why would you say that’s pronounced the same…but but Lax means salmon as well and that’s closer, of course there’s regional differences in spelling
That still isn’t any proof, take any modern word that is shares between languages, it disproves your whole widely accepted theory doesn’t it? Does the similarities of Pizza show there was one language 8000 years ago that branched out? Or does it prove that these people have been in contact with each other for the last hundred? If we assume it was one people then it must be even older because Koreans use the same word and that’s even further away
Be realistic, there is no basis for what you are saying