An English Word That Hasn’t Changed in Sound or Meaning in 8k Years | Hacker News Reader

An English Word That Hasn’t Changed in Sound or Meaning in 8k Years

nautil.us

44 pointsdnetesn51 comments

Online journalism confuses me. This article has a publication date of today. But I swear I read this exact article a while back. Was it merely re-published to make it look current?

Update, sure enough, it was previously published at least 1.5 years ago: http://nautil.us/blog/the-english-word-that-hasnt-changed-in...

And it was discussed back then, complete with complaining about the various inaccuracies of the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19900346

Fun fact, the following are cognate and share a PIE uncestor:

Yard, Garden, Garten(german), Gorod(russian), Ogorod (russian)

Jardin (French)

Nautilus does that, unfortunately.

I'd never heard the word 'lox' before (British). Etymonline[0] suggests that it arrived in American English in the 20th century via Yiddish. So I guess technically the English word has only existed for <100 years :(

[0]: https://www.etymonline.com/word/lox

American here.

I have a larger vocabulary than probably 99% of people, including multiple regional and ethnic dialects, but I have never heard or seen this word in my entire life.

You may be giving yourself a little too much credit here; I expect more than a quarter of people in the northeastern US would know what "bagel and lox" is. Almost everyone who is not a stranger to a Jewish delicatessen would know.

New Yorker here.

I suggest you add "any New York deli or bagel shop" to your 99th percentile list of multiple regional and ethnic dialects.

The population of NYC alone is 2.5% of the US population; the New York Metropolitan Area, about 6%.

That may put you in the minority then, because I know I've heard lox referred to in national pop culture shows like Seinfeld. I always assumed that people would have at least a passing knowledge of it, even if only that it was just salmon that you ate with breakfast.

From OED:

> lox, n. 2

> (lɒks)Pl. lox, loxes.[f. Yiddish laks, f. G. lachs salmon.]

> lox, n. 2

> A kind of smoked salmon.

> 1941: S. Longstreet Last Man around World xii. 135 “Listen, you lox-eater—until last year you thought herring was the only thing they took from the sea.”

> 1950: F. Allen Let. Oct. in G. Marx Groucho Lett. (1967) 73 “At the stage delicatessen..the lox is running good and the cream cheese is spreading easily.”

> 1961: B. Malamud New Life (1962) 121 “I'll bet lox to bagels that Gerald will get more for the department.”

> 1969: A. Glyn Dragon Variation ix. 293 “He..folded himself on to a stool at the counter, and ordered coffee and a bagel with lox.”

> 1972: Times 21 July 12/8 “Where in Paris,..can one enjoy a breakfast of beigles, lox (Yiddish for salmon) and cream cheese?”

> 1973: Daily Colonist (Victoria, B.C.) 16 Sept. 35/5 “The bagel..often is eaten with smoked salmon or lox from Nova Scotia.”

Well, at least in Swedish "lax" means salmon, so I suppose "lox" could have the same Germanic origin.

On the subject of similarities between Indic and European languages, I've noticed a few similarities between English and Farsi (Farsi spelled our with Latin text):

Lip - Lab

Vocal - Vacal

Brother - Baradar

Brother - Dokhtar

Better - Beitar

Bonuses:

Man - Adam

Tight - Tang

Dead - Mord

Desert - Sahraii (aka Sahara)

There are probably a lot more..

Create in English, Krit in Sanskrit, ecrit in French. Death is Mrit in Sanskrit, and morte in French. Is is astu in Sanskrit, Ast in Farsi (if I recall correctly).

Death is "Merg" in Farsi, which sounds similar to "morgue". You're correct about "ast".

In French, "écrit" corresponds to "written", not "create". Stays relevant somehow. "Create" translates to "Créer".

More Farsi words:

Father - Pider

Mother - Maader

Daughter - Dukhter

Dozen - Dawazda

God - Khoda

One - Yek

Two - Do

Three - Se

Four - Chehar

Five (Penta)- Punj

Six - Shush

Seven (Sept) - Heft

Eight (Oct) - Hesht

Nine - Neh

Ten - Deh

No - Neh

Tree - Drekht

Moon - Mah

Foot - Paa

Orange - Naranji

Isn’t Farsi a daughter language descended from the Proto-Indo-Iranian language family?

A little off topic: I remember reading this interesting oddity connecting the Avesta and Vedic religions. Quoting from source [0]

> Pandemonium is Jaan Puhvel’s word for the mutual demonization that occurred when Zarathustra demonized the Gods of the Sanskrit speakers, and the Sanskrit speakers (Rig Vedic priesthood) demonized the Gods of the Zoroastrians (Avestan speakers) in turn. Conspicuous examples are the Devas and the Ashuras. Sanskrit speakers referred to the Devas as good Gods and the word devi, deva is a word for ‘a god, any god,’ whereas the Ashuras are demons in later Sanskrit literature. The Zoroastrians used the word ahura (cognate with Sanskrit ashura) as a word for ‘a god, any god,’ and Ahura Mazda is their highest God, whereas the daevas (cognate with Sanskrit devas) were demonized.

[0] http://piereligion.org/pandemonium.html

I might not have changed in sound or meaning, but in English English in England it is very, very rarely used. We might know what it means from US TV, but you'd never see it on a menu* or supermarket label.

Does it still count if it's fallen out of use?

* I realise someone will google and find it on a UK menu now.

Gravadlax/gravlax is common though.

Is that salmon with extra...gravity?

Salmon from the grave!

Almost. Buried in salt and sugar and cured that way.

Makes me wonder whether it has actually survived in English, in that culinary niche, or was just readopted from some other language that immigrated to America in parallel and happened to bring a dish with them that was named after the word for the animal in that language.

Kind of similar to how livestock remained Germanic in English when the meat dishes derived from them migrated to French/Latin roots. Ironically triggered by Normans who only switched from a Germanic language to French a few generations earlier (at most). Languages are entirely unlike species, they keep cross-fertilizing whenever they are not physically isolated.

Personally, I'm kinda leaning towards a cross between readopted and persisted through trivia (akin to how everyone knows "a group of crows is called a murder" despite not typically being used in normal speech, but more locale-specific than that example): Chicago area, I know I've encountered "laks", I think I've seen "lachs", but I don't recall "lox" at all.

It reentered english through yiddish, though the word lox was also used by scandinavian immigrants in the upper midwest. Laks is the word in old english, but like many food words only eaten by the upper classes (beef, venison, poultry, pork, sausage) was displaced by the norman salmon.

The headline is cheating a bit. It's an English word, and it is (believed to be) pronounced the same as in PIE: but it's also a loanword from Yiddish.

Everyone in the New York metro area, and most people along the East Coast or large metro areas around the US, will know the word lox. That's going to be about as many people as in the whole of England, it surely counts as a word in English, as much as "hoon" or "anorak".

But it hasn't been a word along the entire life track from PIE to modern English. It was preserved in Germanic languages and reintroduced later.

Word is "lox". Meant "salmon". Now means "smoked salmon".

Thank you for saving us a click.

Please don’t use this as an excuse to miss this article.

The lede isn’t even slightly buried (“lox” is the 7th word of the article), it’s just used to present the main topic, i.e. Proto-Indo-Europeans.

It’s not a click saved, it’s a click lost if you don’t already know of the Kurgan Hypothesis.

to this day "lax/lachs/laks" still means salmon in most germanic languages.

I’m more interested in why the re-use of the same word to mean orange the colour and orange the fruit happens in different languages.

Other fruits are orange. No other colour is named the same as a fruit.

Plum, peach, and grape are all color-names, and naming colors after a natural item was and remains common. Orange was derived the same way -- from the fruit. Prior to the 1500s, when the fruit was introduced to England, things were described as "saffron-red", "yellow-red", or simply "red" when we would today call them orange. (There's a really interesting perceptual thing going on here -- if you don't have a word for a color, you don't perceive the color: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/hoffman_01_13/ )

As for non-English: you can trace the spread of the fruit across the Mediterranean by tracking the word appearance. But this only works for European languages... Because Asian languages have a word for orange unrelated to the fruit! In Chinese, the word remains "saffron".

I don’t believe I’ve ever heard those first three used as a colour.

Also the double use of orange does carry into at least one Asian language (which is why it strikes me as a weird similarity): Thai. Even weirder is what is most commonly available as an “orange” in Thailand isn’t really orange on the outside - they have mottled green/orange skin.

> I don’t believe I’ve ever heard those first three used as a colour.

That's a bit unusual - plum and peach in particular are so common in use as colours that they're part of the HTML colour names (as `peachpuff` and `plum`). Even if you haven't, surely you've heard of lime, olive, tomato, etc being used as colours?

Lime green - sure. Olive green? Sure. Tomato? No I have never heard that used as a colour name unless you think “as red as a tomato” is a colour name.

Clearly you've never shopped for paint [0] or used X11 color names[1].

[0] https://www.sherwin-williams.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/h...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11_color_names

I've shopped for paint numerous times in the last few years.

I cannot even being to imagine wanting to paint my house any colour that is even vaguely similar to that of a fruit.

And no, I don't know the X11 colour names, because - and brace yourself this may be shocking - not everyone uses X11.

> Because Asian languages have a word for orange unrelated to the fruit! In Chinese, the word remains "saffron".

Maybe you're thinking of a different Asian language or a time before the introduction of oranges in China, but in modern Mandarin, the term is some variation of (橙/橘)(黄)色, the (yellow) color of (oranges/tangerines).

Yes. To support your point about colours being named after natural things, here's a colour chart from the 18th century.

https://www.c82.net/werner/#preface

Along similar lines, I think it would behoove us English speakers to change the word "pineapple" to the word that's nearly universal in other languages: ananas.

Perilously close to "bananas" - like, what if "apples" and "epples" were two unrelated fruits?

You mean like tomato and potato?

Or (chile) peppers and (black) pepper?

Or artichokes and Jerusalem artichokes?

Personally, I think "ah-nah-NAHS" wouldn't be very confusing with "Buh-nan-uhs", at least when speaking. I'll concede that I can see it getting a bit ambiguous in text, though.

For robustness we might assign a higher edit distance to an add/delete of a letter as compared to a letter substitution. There are "tomato" and "potato" but no "otato" or "omato".

Maybe Jerusalem artichoke is known as a sunchoke in the US for a reason, I dunno. :)

I won't spoil the article entirely, but I will say I thought the word might have been "ship," but I was wrong.

iirc (eg, second hand from the book "the adventures of English") ship came from norse skip, via the same sound-shift that separates shirt and skirt - but is why the K in the term skipper.

That sounds correct to me. In Old English, the word is spelled "scip," pronounced the same as "ship," and quite close to how "skip" is pronounced in Old Norse.

Old Norse and Old English were actually mutually intelligible, BTW, kind of like modern day Swedish and Norwegian.

I would have gone with "no".

My guess was 50/50 between "house" and "food."

If you're into Proto Indo European, check out Ridley Scott's Prometheus - David the android is learning PIE from a computer program at the beginning of the film, and Peter Weyland speaks to the Engineer in PIE.

While PIE-inspired, the dialogue there was not recognisably related to any PIE reconstruction -- check out https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4008 for more on this.

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