
The word “lox” hasn't changed in sound or meaning in 8k years - _Microft
http://nautil.us/blog/the-english-word-that-hasnt-changed-in-sound-or-meaning-in-8000-years
======
danans
> For example, sound [k] changed to [h] from Latin to Germanic, and the Latin
> word casa transformed into the English house.

The way this is written is incorrect. German is not a daughter of Latin, and
the word "house" has a fully understood old Germanic origin [1].

Borrowings from Latin to German starting with the hard c sound retain that
sound.

The relationship between the old Germanic and old Latin is that of cousins.
The various Proto-Indo-European "k" sounds became "h" in Germanic and retained
their "k" pronunciation in Latin.

i.e.

English PIE Latin

hound kyon canis

who kwo- qui

1\. [https://blog.oup.com/2015/01/house-word-origin-
etymology/](https://blog.oup.com/2015/01/house-word-origin-etymology/)

~~~
YayamiOmate
Hey, it's tangential but it always funny to me... Are you perhaps german? I
have no idea what other language would have "language" as feminine =). Though,
in polish "speech" is. One of the meanings is quite close, esp. In the example
of "mother speech" which seems like a direct copy of mutterspraeche. Its
exatcly the same in meaning and literal translation.

I think it is interesting how words got their gender established as part of
their etymology. It baffled me when learing german that every other word had
it different and it's important for grammar.

~~~
ivanhoe
yup it's strange, for instance Serbian and Croatian are almost the same in
many things (even used to be treated as one language for a long time before
the political split), but still many common words have a different gender -
e.g "flu" is in Sebia "grip" (masculine), while in Croatia it's "gripa"
(feminine), but "planet" is in Croatia just "planet" (masculine), while in
Serbia it became "planeta" (feminine). And there are even the words like "bol"
(pain) that is written and pronounced exactly the same in both languages, but
feminine in Croatian, and masculine in Serbian.

~~~
posterboy
Gender often follows pronounciation, not the other way around. Female
inflection correlates with objective inflection, to a degree. Dropping Ablaut
"-a" is not too odd. Ger. "Grippe" is often used as a name, thus without
article, just as you say "I have [sickness]", except for "flu", where _flu_ is
maybe influenced by _flow_.

------
thom
This is apparently an English word that has completely bypassed the English,
because I've never heard the word 'lox' for 'smoked salmon' in my life. Did
this somehow go from mainland Europe straight to America?

~~~
slg
It came to English via Yiddish and therefore via the Jewish people. I wouldn't
be surprised if there are a lot more Yiddish words in American English than
British English considering the size of the Jewish populations in both
countries, the timelines for their immigration, and the roles they have
traditionally taken in society.

~~~
falcor84
It took me quite a few rereadings before it finally clicked that you're
probably not implying that there are more words in American English
originating from Yiddish than those coming from British English words.

~~~
ghayes
Yes to clarify I believe OP is implying: there are more Yiddish words in
current American English than there are Yiddish words in current British
English.

~~~
slg
Exactly. Sorry, I probably phrased that original comment poorly.

------
KhoomeiK
"lox": From Yiddish לאַקס‎ (laks, “salmon”), from Old High German lahs, from
Proto-Germanic lahsaz (“salmon”), from Proto-Indo-European laḱs- (“salmon,
trout”). Cognate to Icelandic lax, German Lachs. More at lax.

It had a number of sound changes in between, and modern English "lox" just
coincidentally resembles PIE's "*laḱs-". It should also be noted that the "k"
is palatized, meaning it'd be pronounced more like "lakys" or "laksh".

~~~
romaniitedomum
This is fascinating to me. There's also "lax" from Old Norse, which also means
"salmon". There's an Irish town near Dublin named "Leixlip" which comes from
"Lax Hlaup", meaning Salmon Leap. It's also the location of some of Intel's
big fabrication plants, to bring this back to technology for no good reason.

Wonder if HN can display Norse runic characters. This is the name "Lax Hlaup"
in the Younger Futhark runic alphabet: ᛚᛅᚼᛋ ᚼᛚᛅᚢᛒ

~~~
Maken
> Wonder if HN can display Norse runic characters.

HN can display any character as long as the computer rendering the page has a
font that supports the glyphs.

~~~
yorwba
HN removes some Unicode ranges, like emoji and a few other symbols.

~~~
Maken
Now that's interesting (and somewhat understandable).

------
aasasd
I'm betting that ‘ma’ hasn't changed in dozens thousand, if not hundreds
thousand years.

Also, dunno how legit this guy is, but he wrote a fiction book about life
32000 years ago, and did some research for it:
[https://www.livescience.com/39324-shaman-kim-stanley-
robinso...](https://www.livescience.com/39324-shaman-kim-stanley-
robinson.html)

> _Kim Stanley Robinson: Once I realized that the narrator had to be talking
> and not writing, that made a huge difference. Then I had to think about
> words. I had to think about every word … I realized that as a normal writer,
> one of my most common phrases to start a sentence would be "in fact." The
> word fact began to look wrong. They didn't have facts. That's a modern
> concept … I couldn't use all kinds of words. I tried to examine every word
> ... I did develop a different vocabulary for all of the words for sexual
> parts. That was because the English language words are all heavily weighted
> by Judeo-Christian or modern pruderies or concerns. They all had baggage. I
> went back to Basque and Proto-Indo-European and I used real words. I just
> used real words from their time. What we're finding is that Basque is
> amazingly old, Proto-Indo-European is amazingly old ... There are about 100
> words that linguists now have determined are probably as old as 15,000 years
> old that never changed like "mama" and "aye." I've been getting a fair
> amount of incredulity and a little bit of objection to having my characters
> say "mama mia," but it turns out that both of those words are outrageously
> ancient._

------
gpm
Funny, the only "lox" I know of is shorthand for liquid oxygen.

~~~
industriousthou
I really only know of either usage because a Bond movie I saw as a kid had the
villain disguise his order for liquid oxygen as smoked salmon. Or something.
Recollection is a little hazy.

~~~
farnerup
I think the joke was that Bond is such a gourmet that he is the only one in
the room who knows that "LOX" means smoked salmon.

------
glup
Short, frequent words are more likely to appear genetically related by chance.

Source:
[https://www.pnas.org/content/110/35/E3253](https://www.pnas.org/content/110/35/E3253)

------
mamcx
From where is the idea that the sound hasn't change, can be?

That is a incredible claim. Is common that all the languages across history to
have an explanation in how was pronounced or have sound samples of how the
people talk about?

Because that is the only sure way to do that claim.

Just taking in account the changes I see in my own city, is impossible that
words not change the sound. Heck, you can bet it change among people in the
same HOUSE!

ie: I truly want to know how this can be proved...

~~~
hannasanarion
It's called "the comparative method" and it has a very robust history of
allowing us to view sound changes from the past.

------
codr7
Take that [0], Lisp. 8k years.

They wore chest beards back then.

[http://www.craftinginterpreters.com/the-lox-
language.html](http://www.craftinginterpreters.com/the-lox-language.html)

------
emmelaich
The fascinating speculation for me is the similarity of Krishna and Christ.

I first read about this in the fantastic book "Ideas" by Peter Watson

[https://www.amazon.com/Ideas-History-Thought-Invention-
Freud...](https://www.amazon.com/Ideas-History-Thought-Invention-
Freud/dp/0060935642)

~~~
posterboy
Linguists will say that Christ didn't have a /k/, hence "ch", and then
religiouss fanatics (what a pleonasm) will join in and give their versions of
heavily revisionist history, a few serious scholars will admit that nothing
worthwhile is known about either as a living being, and the debate will be
desolved by the notion that the onus of proof is on the claimant, who will be
called wrong, if not lunatic, until proof is advanced.

For one, dating of the stories does not really match, I believe.

------
shellmayr
I recently stumbled upon the word 'lakh' in the Indian number system meaning
100000 [1] , which according to Paul Thieme [2] may be related to the German
word Lachs, for salmon, referring to the innumerable fish in a swarm. The way
languages are connected in their histories while seeming so disparate today
keeps fascinating me.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakh)

[2] [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakh](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakh)

------
amarant
Huh, I wasn't aware of this word in the English language, but it is remarkably
similar to the Swedish word "lax" which just means salmon. I guess our
languages are more related than I thought!

~~~
gpvos
English and Swedish are both Germanic languages, which means they share a lot
of basic vocabulary. And a few centuries after the split between North and
West Germanic, a bunch of vikings invaded England and stayed there for a long
time, leaving another large number of words there. A few more centuries later,
English was diluted somewhat by French, but that was mostly fancy words.

------
simonh
I was curious about the Turkish word Pilav so looked it up. It turns out it's
related to both Pilau in India and Paella in Spain, brought by the spread of
Islam. In all cases it's rice or other grain cooked in a broth.

It's a much more recent dispersion than Indo-European, but I still found it
fascinating that the Spanish, Turkish and Indian restaurants in my town have
this connection in their cuisine.

~~~
Jun8
Here’s the etymology given in Nisanyan’s etymology dictionary for Turkish:
from Persian which in turn is from Sans pulāka पुलाक rice bowl < Sans pul पुल्
a group

------
RaceWon
> The only places that call it lox are places that have considerable Jewish
> populations, even in the US.

The first time I heard the word was from my GF's (and future ex-wife's) mom;
whose sister was married to a Jewish man. Sadly, due to a then recent bad
taste experience with a pickled herring in wine sauce--I never sampled any
until years and years after that. Oy vey; a lot of wasted years there!

------
lutorm
I didn't realize people knew about liquid oxygen 8000 years ago.

------
acqq
Moreover, salmon probably entered English during the time French was the
language of English nobility:

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/salmon](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/salmon)

Richard the Lionheart was actually Richard (probably pronounced something like
Rishaa?) Cœur de Lion and spoke French:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_I_of_England](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_I_of_England)

Apparently only one fourth of English words are of Germanic origin:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Frenc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_French_origin#/media/File:Origins_of_English_PieChart.svg)

~~~
microtherion
By the usual pattern in English, "lox" would designate the living animal,
while "salmon" would designate what you'd put on a bagel (cf ox/beef,
lamb/mutton).

~~~
acqq
Also: swine/pork, deer/venison.

Turkey as the name of the bird is however something still unclear. It's not
called so in Turkey.

------
microtherion
I don't quite understand the "not changed in sound" part.

AFAIK, "lox" came to English through Yiddish, which got the word from German.
And in German, the vowel was always "a" not "o" (e.g.
[https://ia600301.us.archive.org/32/items/etymologisches00klu...](https://ia600301.us.archive.org/32/items/etymologisches00klug/etymologisches00klug_bw.pdf)
traces the word to "lahs"), so the vowel quality and the final consonant
appear to have changed.

~~~
subpixel
The German word 'lachs' and the English word 'lox' are pronounced,
essentially, identically.

~~~
tdeck
But the German "ch" phoneme doesn't even exist in (American) English?

~~~
asynchrony
It's not pronounced from the throat like the German "ch" but otherwise it's as
close as it gets.

~~~
anyfoo
There are (at least?) three different ways "ch" can be pronounced in German:
Throaty as in "Buch", a slightly altered "sh" sound like in "Bücher", and just
as plain "k", like in "Lachs".

~~~
posterboy
I was very surprised to see wiktionaries phonetic transcription and sound
sample of "Buch", apparently it is not throaty everywhere.

It's a /k/ in all "-achs", e.g. "Dachs", "wachsen", "Flachs", exactly as in
"bochs" the emulator (compare "boxen"), except across boundaries, e.g.
"wachsam, wach-sam" (wakeful, at guard), or contractions, e.g. "[Meister
seines].Faches/Fachs".

------
Fjolsvith
A friend and I used to pour over a massive dictionary to discover insights
into ancient indo-european thought. An example: "world" a conjugation of two
germanic words - "were" (man) and "ald" (age). We surmised that the "world"
was everything a man experienced during his lifetime, from birth to death.

Gives meaning to the phrase, "Not the end of the world."

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
Along the same lines, what I find fascinating is how similar the words for
mother and father are across nearly all languages, even non-IndoEuropean ones.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/wo...](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/words-
mom-dad-similar-languages/409810/)

~~~
danans
There are 2 main competing hypotheses to explain this. The first one is that
these words are historically related. The other one, which is controversial,
is that these are the result of Sound Symbolism:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism)

In particular sound symbolism hypothesizes that the initial "m" of many
similar "mother" words is related to the sound of a lips sucking milk, like
the verb "mamare" in Latin meaning "to suck".

~~~
eridius
Neither of those match the rather unsurprising answer I've heard before, which
is that "mama" and "papa" are two of the simplest sounds babies can make and
therefore two of the sounds babies are most likely to start making first as
they learn to speak. And us parents naturally assume the baby is trying to
talk to us when they start making sounds, so we latched onto "mama" and "papa"
(or the various extremely similar sounds in other languages) as being the
words the baby was using to refer to us.

~~~
Mvandenbergh
Yes but then we might expect that in some languages "mama" and "papa" are
reversed. What is surprising is not just that these simple words seem to be
preserved but that they mean the same thing.

~~~
eridius
I think "ma" generally comes first in baby's lexicon, and historically the
gestational parent has been the primary caretaker (and the gestational parent
in most cases has the identity "mother"), so it's no surprise that the "ma"
sound is associated with mother.

------
naikrovek
They jinxed it.

In a few years, "lox" is going to mean something entirely different, like a
stray thread on a shirt or something.

------
js2
I beg to differ. Lox is salt cured (brined) for an extended period and not
smoked. It's usually somewhat salty. Nova is short cured and cold smoked, and
not nearly as salty as lox. At least at the Jewish delis I've been to. Google
backs me up.

------
eigenspace
Linguistics is a pretty amazing field that I always feel like I should learn
more about.

~~~
yellowapple
I've sunk a lot of my spare time into binging all sorts of Wikipedia articles
on the evolution of languages.

~~~
KhoomeiK
Same. There's usually a linguistics-related article on the front page of HN
every couple days too. Seems like people who are interested in software tend
to also be interested in linguistics...

------
lagadu
Danish is "laks" and the sound is very close to the English one too.
Interesting.

------
rmbeard
Really? When I was growing up lox meant liquid oxygen the fish was called
salmon in my experience its only recently that English speaking people began
to use the word for liquid oxygen for fish.

