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Comment by klipt | Hacker News Reader

Wiktionary says "lox" comes via Yiddish: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lox#Etymology_1

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?

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I’m Scottish and as soon as I saw “lox” I wondered if it was related to “lax”. Not a common word but have encountered it a few times. I also quite like gravlax which I suppose comes from the same origin!

That's surprising! I know the Scottish dialects has a lot of Scandinavian influences, (ex they say "barn" to mean children)

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!

lol "bairn"

A Barn is still a farm building in Scotland

Yeah, but ignoring spelling and instead listening to how it's pronounced - it's the same. My Swedish grandmother pronounced it pretty much exactly to how Scottish sounds to me.

Not just Scotland, Part of north England I'm from "Bairn" is very widely used (but we had a massive Viking presence that still shows up in place names and such).

My mother's family are from Durham and my grandmother called us 'the bairns'. Also pigs were swine and when we were ill we were 'out of fettle'. I've no trace of it in my own speech now, but still love the sound of it.

I once went to Norway and it seemed to me like they were speaking German with a Geordie accent.

I've always heard 'bairn' and 'barn' pronounced quite differently, with the former rhyming with 'air'

In my (English) head, a Scottish (and even more so Irish) accent does pronounce 'barn' to rhyme with 'air' too though.

Of course I'm probably doing a terrible impression of each in my head.

There are some strong accents that could pronounce them similiarly, the islands / getting close to irish could pronounce the "air" in "barn". But in general / central belt those words are pronounced differently

I was more implying that the Swedish pronunciation of its "barn" is more like English "air". (For some Swedish dialects.) The takeaway, when comparing related languages, don't think too much about spelling. Compare how actual people say words, and you will often find striking similarities.

>Yeah, but ignoring spelling and instead listening to how it's pronounced - it's the same

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.

> the Swedish variant has roots in the Germanic and Baltic languages, which are not directly related to Yiddish afaik

In fact, Yiddish is Judeo-German and has elements from Slavic languages.

....maybe read the article?

Yiddish is a germanic language with Hebrew elements. If you know German or a Scandinavian language, you can understand a fair bit of written Yiddish just by squinting and guessing along.

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