This is apparently an English word that has completely bypassed the English, because I've never heard the word 'lox' for 'smoked salmon' in my life. Did this somehow go from mainland Europe straight to America?
I was born in Brooklyn, to a Yiddish speaking family. Occasionally I use a Yiddish word in Israel and I'm met by a blank stare. 60% of the Jewish population here came from countries like Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, etc, where nobody knew Yiddish.
Its not merely the dialect, its also the accent. The hard Dutch 'g' isn't spoken in everywhere in The Netherlands (for example the south doesn't use it).
A musical piece about the Amsterdam Dutch dialect is Osdorp Posse - Origineel Amsterdams [1]. It contains a lot of Amsterdam Dutch vocubulary. As someone who cannot speak Dutch, see if you can recognize any Yiddish words?
[1] https://lyrics.fandom.com/wiki/Osdorp_Posse:Origineel_Amster...
However the closely related "lax", used in some English dialects and in Scotland, also means salmon and comes, via Old English, from the same root: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lax#Etymology_1
So maybe ask your Scottish friends?
Lax is Swedish for salmon, so I would've expected a similar root for that word! Some quick googling suggests the Swedish variant has roots in the Germanic and Baltic languages, which are not directly related to Yiddish afaik. Funny how languages are so similar sometimes, seemingly by chance!
In fact, Yiddish is Judeo-German and has elements from Slavic languages.
A Barn is still a farm building in Scotland
I once went to Norway and it seemed to me like they were speaking German with a Geordie accent.
Of course I'm probably doing a terrible impression of each in my head.
I’m Scottish and pronounce the two words quite differently. “Bairn” sounds like “bear” with an “n” at the end and “barn” has a much harder “a” sound.
Interestingly, “burn” is a common word for a small stream in Scotland, but I digress.
For some reason, one of the scenes that stuck in my mind was when the head of the Japanese intelligence services (Tanaka?) and Bond are reviewing the receipts that the latter managed to steal from the company they suspect is acting as a front for Spectre. Tanaka is reading out a perfectly innocent list of items and comes across a huge order for "lox", and asks Bond what that means. At first he just defeatedly dismisses as an American word for smoked salmon, but then has a brainwave and says something like "But... it can also be a shorthand for Liquid Oxygen, which is needed to power rockets!".
Counter-example: Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Some words that are fully considered English have an even more convoluted history than this. The word for “chocolate” came from Spanish, and came to Spanish from Nahuatl which is completely unrelated to English, and may (though it gets obscure here) have in turn come to Nahuatl from an unrelated Mayan language.
English does have a lot of loan words, but they are comparatively less frequently used than non-loan words. The overwhelming majority of the most commonly used core vocabulary is descended straight from Old English.
In fairness, there are some major counterexamples: “they”, “use”, and “people” are loan words in the core vocabulary.
"does" or at least do-support comes from celtic.
"have" is pretty close ot "avoir", and b/v (viz Ger "haben" is not a common sound correspondance.
"a" is not a word, it's a particle so short so that saying it descended is almost non-sensical. The proper form would be "an" (and even french "un" agrees).
"of", again a meaningless particle. There went so much wrong with prepositions, too, since PIE, they got turned up-side down, literally.
"non" rings of French, not German.
"to be" mostly changed since Germanic, and not straight forward either.
"than", nope, not original.
word has a fine root, most I'll take, core is not core vocabulary, the developed seemingly independently, but analogue to other Germanic languages, this, that are OK but close to Fr. ce, ca anyway, is is still pretty close to Latin est, Germanic or not ...
You were saying?
I.e. saying English stole from French is a bit like saying Hindi, Irish, or Navajo stole from English. Gets the power relations completely backwards.
You could make a case for the validity of this quip for more recent loanwords, but there are relatively few of those compared to French, Norse, and Latin.
The definition of loan word is a bit vague, of course, and the origin of some words is uncertain, and the proportion of loan words will depend a bit on the topic and the style of writing.
(There are 72 words in the previous two paragraphs, if you expand "30%" and "that's". So about 22 of them should be loan words? Seems plausible ...)
Example: Most English accents today don't pronounce an R if a vowel doesn't follow it ("non rhotic"). This is also true in accents of New York, New England, and parts of the US southeast.
However, a few hundred years ago English accents were all rhotic, like the majority of the US. I had heard somewhere that the non-rhotacism was actually adopted in the northeast and affluent south after it became popular in England and also after colonization by people who would have pronounced all the Rs. That is to say some well to do US accents kept up with changes occurring in places like London.
Outside of some parts of Boston we pick up those Rs our friends drop and put them to use.
I grew up with a western mass accent, which is a sort of lighter version of bahston with less non-rhoticity. I can turn it off, but lately choose not to, also for social class reasons.
Distinctive communities get broken up now and disrupted by media.
Not so. Maybe this is true in many cases, but I personally know of at least one outlier: a relative who grew up in West Virginia, lost her accent to work in radio and news, and when older re-married to a man from Texas with a heavy accent and developed one herself.
It is also the case that many people slip back into accents as they age.
The more you know…
A surprising amount of Americanisms, and even spellings - like recognize instead of recognise - not only started here, but were once preferred as more correct! It's only fairly recently that The Times - last 20 or 30 years - dropped "Oxford spelling" (As the OED goes that way too). Nowadays if you use that variant someone will inevitably cry Americanism. Web spell checker is, of course, whining about -ize above as it's in GB mode.
Yet it cuts both ways - there's a lot of real Americanisms that have been forgotten in the US and are never identified as such in the UK.
Got/gotten - British laziness or fashion decided gotten was no longer necessary somewhere along the line. Yet we still use forgot and forgotten. Go figure.
Given the sheer quantity of English that's been begged, borrowed and stolen from other parts of the world, I don't understand the singular picking out of Americanisms. Though the US "I could care less" clearly only makes sense as GB's "I couldn't care less".
Shakespeare's jokes and puns work SO much better in original pronunciation. Received pronunciation needs to die in a fire.
Peace. :)
Have you looked into Korean at all? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul is a quite remarkable success story in changing spelling with the aim of increasing literacy rates.
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I don't know why some of us dislike 'Americanisms' so much. Some of it will just be resistance to change - the advent of the internet meant a fairly sudden exposure to written en-US.
Anecdotally, I'm the only one amongst my friends who cares about these things. The skyrocketing usage of Americanisms really grinds my gears.
Maybe after Brexit we'll get an Académie Anglais to settle these arguments for those of us who still want to speak the King's.
Course no one ever told the Mail that some of Webster's reforms and American spellings came from Shakespeare either. He was far more phonetic than modern spelling either side of the Atlantic - as was everyone back then. Then you discover Shakespeare's spelling wasn't even consistent with himself and used at least a few words both ways - color and colour springs to mind.
Surely it will be as successful as Académie Française has been preventing French adoption of le computer, le weekend and all the rest? ie not at all. :)
It's all a bit silly. No one yells Indianism, well Tamil, when someone talks of going for a curry, yet we probably acquired almost as many from India as the US.
Edit: Hadn't been aware of of that aspect of Korea - and that North and South hugely disagree on number of letters! Most extensive change I knew was Indonesia after independence, adopting Indonesian from Malay when there's hundreds of native languages, and most spoke something else.
And -ize is perfectly acceptable to many British English spell checkers. Unfortunately it seems impossible to find one that will reject -ise spellings when the -ize one is the more etymologically 'correct'.
For instance, I am using Firefox with a British English checker and it, correctly, allows "advertise" but not "advertize"; however, it also allows both "mythologize" and "mythologise" when only the first would be accepted in the Oxford tradition.
I'll be sticking with the advice in Fowler's Modern English Usage, Second Edition.
There's a good wiki on the subject if others are interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_s...
The reason for this is mountains and isolation. You get a few villages that interact or a region that does so, and it varies wildly over the years before television and radio. People have simply kept the dialects in the modern age. Some are harder for native Norwegians than others, but supposedly they should all be understood.
It's just one of those 'facts' that seems sensible until you think about it a little bit.
I've heard of lachsfisch (sp?) in German for salmon, and I think the Swedish term is similar, so if I ever heard the term, I probably attributed it to German. I've certainly had a lot of smoked salmon spread and smoked salmon by itself, I've just don't recall ever hearing it referred to in English as anything other than "smoked salmon".
So yeah, I recognize that word as German or Swedish, not English.
Nova Lox and Schmear (yiddish for smear/spread which is usually cream cheese or flavored cream cheese)on the menu.
I'd say both terms(lox(originally pronounced lacks) and shmear) are sufficiently commercialized that they are common at any bagel place even outside of cities with large Jewish populations.
At least in the US, maybe not in the UK.
Also note that most lox isn't actually lox. Traditional Jewish Lox is brined salmon belly. These days lox usually refers to any smoked salmon, especially less salty types then traditional lox
Lax = Salmon
Grava = preparing raw salmon (or other fish/meat) by keeping it in a mixture of salt, sugar and spices.
Salt and sugar keeps the fish from spoling, lactic acid bacteria preserves the fish. Back in the days this was done by digging a hole in the ground, cover the fish with spruce/fresh leaves and salt. Then lleaving it lying there for a couple of days. This also gives the origin of the word "grava" which in this context would bean "bury".
And is cognate to English "grave" as in a burial place! Other cognates are Middle English (and modern Dutch) "graven", and German "graben", both meaning "to dig". Ultimately deriving from Proto-Germanic *grabaną. "Groove" is also related. Interestingly the adjective sense of "grave" in English (as in "serious") is of unrelated Romance origin (cf. "gravid", "gravity", "gravitas").