TIL the word 'lox' (smoked salmon) is the oldest word in the English language- unchanged in meaning and pronunciation for 8,000 years
TIL the word 'lox' (smoked salmon) is the oldest word in the English language- unchanged in meaning and pronunciation for 8,000 years
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 quintess...
it's also yummy
You're viewing a single thread.
Lox means specifically smoked salmon? Odd. "Lax" is the swedish word for just "salmon". I really thought lox was just another word for salmon.
The German word for salmon is "Lachs" but it's pronounced "Lax". I wonder who had the word first
A couple thousand years ago German and English hadn’t even split off from each other — they were the same language.
Yeah, English is a Germanic language. The same way Spanish and French are romantic, and derived from Romans.
Yeah, it was called Gerlish. At least in Gerlish it was.
The Italian word for earth is la terra, while in Spanish it's la tierra.
Does it make any sense to say that one language had it first? Both are directly from Latin terra.
English, German, Dutch, Swedish, etc. all descend from a common ancestor, Proto- Germanic. There's a lot of vocabulary they all inherited from it.
Lox is a rap group. Lax is an airport.
I don't know what that means, but I think Big Salmon is behind it.
Same in Serbian, salmon is "losos", could refer to the fish, and specifically "smoked salmon" is "dimljeni losos".
Thanks for chiming in! What's the word for smoke?
"Dim". "Dimljeni" is smoked, so just like in English.
Wow, interesting. Thanks!
In Swedish, it's "rök", like as in "Ragnarök".
"Laks" in Norwegian. "Røykalaks" is smoked salmon