The English Word That Hasn't Changed in Sound or Meaning in 8,000 Years

[ProudLib72]

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 a lox bagel—a century-old popular appetizing store, Russ & Daughters, calls it “The Classic.” But Guy, who has lived in the city for the past 17 years, is passionate about lox for a different reason. “The pronunciation in the Proto-Indo-European was probably ‘lox,’ and that’s exactly how it is pronounced in modern English,” he says. “Then, it meant salmon, and now it specifically means ‘smoked salmon.’ It’s really cool that that word hasn’t changed its pronunciation at all in 8,000 years and still refers to a particular fish.”

...snip...

The word lox was one of the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were, and where they lived. The fact that those distantly related Indo-European languages had almost the same pronunciation of a single word meant that the word—and the concept behind it—had most likely existed in the Proto-Indo-European language. “If they had a word for it, they must have lived in a place where there was salmon,” explains Guy. “Salmon is a fish that lives in the ocean, reproduces in fresh water and swims up to rivers to lay eggs and mate. There are only a few places on the planet where that happens.”

...snip...

n his book The Power of Babel, Columbia University linguist John McWhorter wrote, “Everything about a language is eternally and inherently changeable, not just the slang and the occasional cultural destination, but the very sound and meaning of basic words, and the word order and grammar.” It’s nice to know, though, that some words never change—lox being one of the most surprising.

http://nautil.us/blog/the-english-word-that-hasnt-changed-in-sound-or-meaning-in-8000-years?utm_source=pocket-newtab

I recommend reading the entire article. I snipped to capture just those sections about "lox", but the article is more about the spread of Indo-European language.

[Stuart G]

1. We learn something new every day..right here at DU. k and r

[exboyfil]

2. I listened to Dr. McWhorter's Great Courses lectures

on the Language Families of the World. I highly recommend them. He is a great speaker. Plan to listen to some of his series eventually as well.

[ProudLib72]

3. Just poking around I found another article

'Oldest English words' identified http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7911645.stm

It's an interesting model. I'm sure it has validity, but there are always surprises.

[tblue37]

6. I have some of his books and also read his articles in "The Atlantic." nt

[Ilsa]

4. According to rapists, the meaning of the word, "No" changes hourly.

I'm surprised "No" isn't the most unchanged word.

[Igel]

5. Strictly speaking, there really are also words that don't go back to a common ancestor.

They may look like they do ,but they're borrowed.

Slavic has a few old borrowings from Greek, indications that Greek traders BCE managed to get up to where Slavs lived (or vice-versa).

There are some Iranian/Slavic religious terms that probably date to Sarmatian times, for example.

Words like "cheese" in English are Latin, and old, showing the change of k > ch (using what symbols I have).

And some confounds like ship and skiff are the same word, but one's borrowed and one's not. English lost all initial sk- clusters.

We like to say that we don't borrow core vocabulary, but the doubles beef/cow and mutton/sheep show that food was Norman and in-the-house while the Angles and Saxons tended the herds in the field. And we have the foreign pronoun "they".

I always like the ones that don't look like they're the same. Like Russian zub and English "gum" or gnosis and Russian znat' and "know". Or English "wolke" and Russian oblako, both with a meaning "drawn out" (Russian started with obvlakno, so the v-l-k root is easier to spot; of course, vlak by itself is the Czech word for 'train' these days). Or the less obvious window and okno, where what's in common is semantics--one's a wind-eye and the other (okno) is derived from the usual Russian word oko 'eye'.

[tblue37]

7. About animals at table (French)and on the hoof (English): another is pork/pig. nt

[ProudLib72]

9. Caesar to Kaiser to Tzar

Your "cheese" reference made me think of that.

Have you ever heard of the language called Rotwort or Rot Wort? According to a fellow grad student who was working in German (obviously), Rotwort was a spoken language used exclusively between Jews and Romani to communicate vital information about what towns were hostile to them. Now I don't know if this guy was pulling my leg or not, but I asked him about it over the course of a year or so, and his description never changed.

[airplaneman]

8. Does this have anything to do with the Lox Nest Monster? n/t.

[Totally Tunsie]

10. Mmmmm...breakfast!

Please pass the bagels.

[ProudLib72]

11. NO! You will be patient!

We are holding a colloquium on the etymology of the word. Afterwards, you can have the leftovers.


Reminds me of the leftovers they would put in the grad student office. One morning we discovered a huge pile of waffles that had been left over from the previous morning. I was one of about five TAs for a Greek history class. I came in and sat down. My buddy showed up with three of the day old waffles wrapped up like a burrito, happily munching away.

[Totally Tunsie]

12. LOL - Well, I occasionally have to "eat" my words. LOX!!

[DFW]

13. "Lox" in English is pronounced almost like the German "Lachs"

Maybe "Lox" means "smoked salmon" in some parts of the English-speaking world, but in German, it still just is the word for "salmon." You have to use their word for "smoked (geräuchert)" if you want smoked salmon in German-speaking countries.

Interestingly enough, in Dutch, where most words resemble their German counterparts, the word for salmon is "zalm," which is pronounced "ZAHL-um," more resembling the French "saumon."

[anarch]

14. haha I thought it was going to be "fuck" or something

It's just got such a satisfying sound to it, maybe because of the long association with vulgarity, but it's such a useful word, too--can be just about every part of speech! As in the reported quote from some aircraft mechanic upon skinning his knuckles after a wrench slipped off of a worn bolt he was trying to turn: "Fuck! The fucking fucker's fucked."