TIL the word 'lox' (smoked salmon) is the oldest word in the English language- unchanged in meaning and pronunciation for 8,000 years
The English Word That Hasn’t Changed in Sound or Meaning in 8,000 Years
it's also yummy
It's not a loan word, it's the word for salmon in the oldest constructable ancestor of English.
According to etymonline,
Lax. Noun. "salmon," from Old English leax (see lox). Cognate with Middle Dutch lacks, German Lachs, Danish laks, etc.; according to OED the English word was obsolete except in the north and Scotland from 17c., reintroduced in reference to Scottish or Norwegian salmon.
It's weird in that lax died ~400 years ago, then was borrowed back ~100 years ago into American English from Yiddish-speaking immigrants.
It's a weird loanword in that it was a loaned obsolete word that underwent some semantic narrowing in the loan.
Exactly it predates the English language, lots of words do.
The English language is basically a neglected toddler by linguistic standards, it was left alone in a closet to fend for itself
Edit:
Also funny you just said it's the word for salmon...
Instead of you know, salmon...
Laks just meant "fish" in the proto languages.
Which is why OPs link doesn't mention the spelling not changing, and why it's wrong about the meaning not changing too
Going from "any type of fish, living or dead" to "specific type of fish when prepared by smoking"
Seems like a pretty significant change in meaning to me
Get out of here with your reasonable, scientific explanation!
We want our outrage porn about smoked salmon, dammit!
/s
Super impressive since English is only 1,500 years old...
I'm guessing you mean "Old English" since it's sometimes said to be that old, but realistically that version of English has very little in common with English now (it was verb-second, for example, like German still is today). Even the post-Danelaw version of a couple hundred years later (with Norse borrowings like "husband" and even the pronouns "they/them") resembles modern English a lot more. Middle English was largely due to the influx of Norman French (both morphological and syntactic changes), and the whole thing isn't really recognizable as quasi Modern English until around 1500-1600.
Point is: language is a continuum, and a lot of these oldest this/oldest that claims in language just have to do with where someone is arbitrarily drawing a line.
Modern German for lox is "Lachs" (same pronunciation really, and spelling ultimately doesn't matter in linguistics). This makes sense, because the English of 1500 years ago would have been relatively close to German varieties of the period. But doesn't that mean "lox/Lachs/however you want to spell it" goes back further than that, perhaps to some earlier parent of both English and German? Yes, it likely does.
Edit: and yes, as others have said, that means lox is not a borrowing (vs. e.g. "husband"). Lox existed before anyone was calling English English. But that's also true of e.g. pronoun "he" and a lot of other stuff: by definition, any word that is reconstructed in Proto-Germanic and still exists in English today is "the oldest" (but there will be many of them and they're all roughly considered to be the same age, since proto-languages are ultimately abstractions with no exact dating).
Yes that's how languages evolve. It's interesting, isn't it?
Oldest word [used] in the English language
Not oldest English word.
Then it's still not true because row (roe) is older...
I don't know why people keep jumping in this.
There's so much wrong with OPs link, defending it in one aspect just invalidates it another...
Omfg why do we bother calling it smoked salmon when lox is much cooler?
Many people call it lox. You can too!
Not me. Tis a silly word. Now begone peasant. I must get back to mine shrubberies.
For me, those are two different (but equally delicious things): https://www.foodnetwork.com/how-to/packages/food-network-essentials/lox-vs-smoked-salmon
Ya for sure it’s a difference. Both are awesome. I’m an east coast Jew, obviously raised in bagels and lox. But now I live on the west coast where Jews are rare and strange. People here don’t know words like “lox” or “shmear”, so sometimes I just call it smoked salmon the way you might call latkes “potato pancakes”.
But now my new brother in law manages a salmon hatchery and gives us jars of smoked salmon he makes and it’s so unbelievably good. Is lox cured instead of smoked? Idk. Both great. It’s splitting hairs really, isn’t it? Salmon is so good!
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.
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.
"Laks" in Norwegian. "Røykalaks" is smoked salmon
Lox is a rap group. Lax is an airport.
I don't know what that means, but I think Big Salmon is behind it.
Liquid Oxygen? Wow I didn't know it was that old. ::: spoiler disclaimer This is sarcasm. :::
Ancient Sumerian refrigeration technology was seriously underrated: -297°F was no problem for them
As a native English speaker who'd never heard of this word - TIL x2
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.
Yes, English didn't exist 8000 years ago. Instead, there was a language called Proto-Indoeuropean spoken on the steppes of Ukraine. Just like how Latin spread and local dialects slowly became Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, etc., PIE spread out and its descendants became Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, Latin, German, etc.
Part of what happened over time was sound shifts. For example, PIE p morphed into an f in Proto-Germanic. Father and the Latin word pater go back to the same PIE root word, but father exhibits the sound change of p -> f you saw in Germanic languages.
Similarly, Spanish has a sound change where f changed into h. So the Latin word fabulari (to chat) became hablar in Spanish and falar in Portuguese.
The point of the article is that the PIE word for salmon, laks, by random chance didn't really morph much in Germanic languages. So you have lax, lox, lachs, etc.
Interestingly, the Old English word for salmon was leax, and that made its way into Middle English and early Modern English as lax. It died out in favor of the French-derived salmon, and then we borrowed lox back from Yiddish.
It's like if beef entirely replaced cow, then we borrowed back koe or kuh from Dutch or German.
Try reading it differently.
It's a really old word (oldest) that is currently used in the English language.
Basically
The islands would have something that eventually became (regional) Gaelic. But the Normans did a good job killing most of these people and replacing them with pale people
If people were there 8000 years ago, this part didn’t happen until your time period
I think it’s saying that it’s the oldest word that English speakers today use which might not be true
So looking it up, the Yiddish word comes from an old German word and is around 1000 to 1500 years old. This makes a lot more sense and is in the time period for when they started killing Gaelic people
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
Now that's interesting. The German word for salmon is "Lachs" [laks] which is basically the same as "lox" [lɔks]. The change from the "ɔ" sound to the "a" sound likely has to do with the Great Vowel Shift
What's the Great Vowel Shift?
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)
Gött med lax!
Gott með lax!
I blame horses for the words above.
Det var konstigt
The most important words are the oldest
Important words undergo sound changes all the time.
For example, in Germanic languages, Proto Indoeuropean p sounds consistently morphed into f sounds. So the PIE word pods became Proto Germanic fots became English foot. pəter became fader became father. The preposition per became fur became for.
Lox is mostly unusual in that it didn't have any major sound changes affect it in Germanic languages.
Or the newest. I definitely talk about shrinkflation a lot more than I imagine they did in 1530
Mmm laks
The coolness of this is not lox on me.
It's also a common abbreviation for liquid oxygen in rocket engineering.
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?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Zach Sherwin Kicks It Old School
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If you had to clarify it meant smoked salmon, then I think it changed
Lox still means smoked salmon. It may not be a word you use but many people do.
Lox is cured salmon, not smoked salmon.
There’s this great youtoobs channel I watch a lot. It’s this attorney who shows you how to select smoked salmon in the supermarket.
It’s the Lox Picking Lawyer.
fucking got me, good one
I’m proud of that one. Sometimes the stars and my ADHD align.
I heard they had a collab with a youtoobs channel that shows people how to become professional administrative employee, called "staff made here".
Isn't that the same guy who is also part of the yootoobz channel where there's an insanely rich guy who constantly blows his money on bakeries and baked goods, called "Mr. Yeast"?
God damn you down to the fireiest pits of hell.
There's lox to unpick there