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
Super impressive since English is only 1,500 years old...
And that it's long before we even started using the modern alphabet...
This seems more like words like sarcophagus, that exist in modern English, but are recently borrowed words.
It's not an English word, it's just English as a language steals words from lots of existing languages
Correct me if I'm wrong, but English didn't exist 8000 years ago. Olde English was synthesized from numerous Germanic dialects in the 5th century, which was about 1600 years ago. Not only that, but "lox" isn't an English word, it's Yiddish, and it wasn't introduced into the English speaking world until 1934 when a wave of Jewish immigrants moved to Western Europe and North America.
This is cool enough that all Indo-European languages should start calling salmon Lox again.
With the right strategy and current technology, we should be able to evolve all current Indo-European languages back to a singular language over a thousand years or so. That would unite half the world in language.
A highly noble goal. We could call it, the Lox plan.
finally, I understand now, what means first part of my nickname, besides Liquid OXygen
I work for a small company owned and run by a Jewish family
One of their favorite jokes goes like this:
You can't hold us in a prison cell! We eat lox for breakfast!
(And we do indeed have bagels and lox brought in regularly)
Mmm laks
The coolness of this is not lox on me.
It's also a common abbreviation for liquid oxygen in rocket engineering.
- Toasted Onion Bage
- Cream Cheese
- Lox
- Fresh Tomato Slice
- Capers
- Salt and Pepper
Best breakfast ever
Can you draw the conclusion that lox (salmon) was one of, if not the most important food for 8000 years? Since the word would fall under the core-language same as mother, father, etc? Or would that be a stretch?