TIL the word 'lox' (smoked salmon) is the oldest word in the English language- unchanged in meaning and pronunciation for 8,000 years

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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

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It's not a loan word, it's the word for salmon in the oldest constructable ancestor of English.

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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.

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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

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I think by that logic almost all words in every language predate the language they are part of. Like saying that our noses aren't really human because noses predate humans.

a neglected toddler

What do you mean by this?

As island-based languages go English is probably the least isolated in history. It's Germanic relatives are all nearby. Britain has had extensive links to the continent for the entire history of English and well before. It's an international language and has been for hundreds of years.

English also isn't that weird just because it got a large infusion of (pretty closely related) Norman words after 1066. Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese all have over half their lexical items from Chinese, an unrelated language.

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What do you mean by this?

The majority of the English language, it was only spoken by commoners with no formal education.

Literally never went to school or learned how to read or write.

Which is why it's one of the hardest languages to learn, there wasn't even a noble population who were helping rules be set logically, it's a slang language.

Which is why it's almost impossible to credit the English language with any words except for things invented by English speakers.

Other languages weren't as bad at it

And it's not a huge deal...

Until someone claims an English word has existed for 8,000 years unchanged.

Then it's worth pointing out how ridiculous that claim is.

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Literally never went to school or learned how to read or write.

You're describing every language for the overwhelming majority of the last 150,000+ years. English is not unique in that.

Which is why it’s one of the hardest languages to learn

It's not. English has a lot of irregularity to remember, but not the most. How difficult you find a language depends on your native language. English lacks things like elaborate case structures or grammatical gender which can be hard unless your native language has something similar. The 'th' sound is rare, but there are no clicks or tones. SVO is not the most common word order, but it's not the rarest.

there wasn’t even a noble population who were helping rules be set logically, it’s a slang language.

Huh? That's not how having a nobility works. Or what slang is. The rich aren't more logical, and they aren't concerned with making language easier. If anything nobles want more arcane language that takes longer to learn to better differentiate themselves from those with less free time.

It sounds like you're thinking of the prescriptive grammar movement where from the 1700s or so rich English speakers decided if it's not possible in Latin then it's uncouth in English, and started making up nonsense rules like no split infinitives or ending sentences with a preposition. They couched it in terms of being logical and correct but it was in reality a novel way of marking social class. And ~700 years after the English peasant/Norman aristocrat divide.

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You’re describing every language for the overwhelming majority of the last 150,000+ years. English is not unique in that.

Name a single language that didn't have an aristocracy that knew how to read and write and learned formalized Grammer for the majority of that languages history.

I didn't read anything else you didn't understand after that first bit tho.

I can help a little, but I'm not teaching an etymology class over here.

agent_flounder

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Name a single language that didn't have an aristocracy that knew how to read and write and learned formalized Grammer [sic] for the majority of that langauges [sic] history.

You do realize more than half of the world's ~7,000 languages still have no writing system, right?

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Name a single language that didn’t have an aristocracy that knew how to read and write and learned formalized Grammer for the majority of that languages history.

😂 I'm going to be generous and assume you're just trolling now and don't seriously believe this.

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Which is why it's one of the hardest languages to learn, there wasn't even a noble population who were helping rules be set logically, it's a slang language.

Which languages had nobles changing the rules of the language to be logical, and beat the peasantry until they repeated their absurd shibboleths?

Proscriptivists have existed in many languages, English included. They've basically always been tilting at windmills.

Governments tend to be most effective at killing languages wholesale, rather than systemically changing grammar. And it's something that's been far more effective in the past couple hundred years as part of nation- building projects. E.g. the efforts of France, Italy and Spain to squash minority languages like Occitan, Galician or Neapolitan.

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Which languages had nobles changing the rules of the language to be logical, and beat the peasantry until they repeated their absurd shibboleths?

Is that what people aren't understanding?

When a language had nobles that knew the rules for the language, those rules were documented and maintained, even tho commoners didn't use it.

Later, when education caught on, the commoners were taught correct grammar, spelling, and usage. Not what earlier generations of commoners used.

It's not that they enforced grammar at the time, it's that we know about those languages is primarily from nobles writing shit down in that language.

No one was writing English for centuries

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Ah, yes, that's why the French still speak perfect Latin.

Yes, old grammar textbooks have been an incredibly important resource for linguists, particularly for reconstructing ancient pronunciations. They're useful for teaching historians etc. Old French or whatever.

But we generally haven't been terribly successful at beating students into using obsolete grammar rules and to stop using modern grammatical innovations.

uienia

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The English language is basically a neglected toddler by linguistic standards, it was left alone in a closet to fend for itself

Please stop with those silly linguistic allegories about English made by people who have no idea how other languages works.

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Get out of here with your reasonable, scientific explanation!

We want our outrage porn about smoked salmon, dammit!

uienia

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Old English isn't 8000 years old though.

circuitfarmer

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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).

NataliePortland

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Yes that's how languages evolve. It's interesting, isn't it?

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Yep, 8,000 years ago laks meant any type of fish, living or prepared food.

And even in modern times it means the same thing: a specific breed of fish when prepared for eating by smoking

It is fascinating how words evolve and change instead of staying the same for that long...

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Yep, 8,000 years ago laks meant any type of fish, living or prepared food.

Citation?

From what I've seen, 8000 years ago it meant salmon. Today, in English it means smoked salmon.

It's a surprisingly minor shift for 8k years.

Neato

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Oldest word [used] in the English language

Not oldest English word.

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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...

HelluvaKick

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Omfg why do we bother calling it smoked salmon when lox is much cooler?

NataliePortland

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Many people call it lox. You can too!

blanketswithsmallpox

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Not me. Tis a silly word. Now begone peasant. I must get back to mine shrubberies.

sunbrrnslapper

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For me, those are two different (but equally delicious things): https://www.foodnetwork.com/how-to/packages/food-network-essentials/lox-vs-smoked-salmon

NataliePortland

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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!

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Lox means specifically smoked salmon? Odd. "Lax" is the swedish word for just "salmon". I really thought lox was just another word for salmon.

twoshoes

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The German word for salmon is "Lachs" but it's pronounced "Lax". I wonder who had the word first

CoggyMcFee

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A couple thousand years ago German and English hadn’t even split off from each other — they were the same language.

PM_Your_Nudes_Please

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Yeah, English is a Germanic language. The same way Spanish and French are romantic, and derived from Romans.

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Yeah, it was called Gerlish. At least in Gerlish it was.

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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.

Plopp

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Lox is a rap group. Lax is an airport.

I don't know what that means, but I think Big Salmon is behind it.

AccountMaker

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Same in Serbian, salmon is "losos", could refer to the fish, and specifically "smoked salmon" is "dimljeni losos".

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Thanks for chiming in! What's the word for smoke?

AccountMaker

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"Dim". "Dimljeni" is smoked, so just like in English.

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Wow, interesting. Thanks!

In Swedish, it's "rök", like as in "Ragnarök".

CurlyMoustache

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"Laks" in Norwegian. "Røykalaks" is smoked salmon

dangblingus

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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.

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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.

Shave_MyBeever

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Try reading it differently.

It's a really old word (oldest) that is currently used in the English language.

ILikeBoobies

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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

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8k years ago, the distant ancestor of English was spoken on the steppes of Ukraine.

Their word for salmon was laks.

That became the English lox, Swedish lax, German lachs, Lithuanian lašiša, Russian losos, and Polish łosoś.

ILikeBoobies

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Yes I read the article that claimed people lived on the steppes 8000 years ago, however I didn’t read any links between that and the word to which I went elsewhere and still didn’t find any links to the word to that time period but did find that it is less than 1500 years old

Anyone would be skeptic of this claim though given we don’t even know many Hittite words despite them having a writing system and being less than half that age

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If you'd like to look up more about the origins of PIE, look up the Kurgan Hypothesis, which suggests that Proto-Indoeuropean originated on the steppes.

Basically everything we know about PIE, we know from looking at its descendants. If a word appears in multiple unrelated branches, it's probably from the common ancestor. Particularly if there's consistent sound changes on one or more branches.

For example, it seems that a lot of PIE words with a p morphed into f in germanic languages. So, given the English father, Dutch Vader, Old Saxon fadar, Latin pater, Sanskrit pitar, Old Persian pita, etc. we can figure out that father goes back to some original PIE word which was probably something like pəter.

Similarly, we see similar words for salmon both in Germanic and Slavic. And in the extinct Tocharian language, the word for fish in general was laks. Lox originating only 1500 years ago means that the Slavic and Tocharian would be a pretty strange coincidence.

ILikeBoobies

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So the article makes no links between the word and the theory

It just says it’s the oldest word and cites the theory

Not only do I point out that it’s an impossible connection but also through outside research find that it’s wrong

So your response is to just rehash the article and even your example doesn’t fit with this word 1. Because it is impossible to say it’s the oldest word without written proof and evolving from another would disqualify it from being the oldest word 2. Somewhere between 8000 years ago and 2000 years ago the word disappeared and came back with supposedly the same pronunciation and spelling that we haven’t any proof of except from as you said “many languages use it today…even if they’ve been mingling the last 2000 years”

Come on, even if we say it comes from the word Lak or Lakos. Why would you draw that to salmon over say… lake? And why would you say that’s pronounced the same…but but Lax means salmon as well and that’s closer, of course there’s regional differences in spelling

That still isn’t any proof, take any modern word that is shares between languages, it disproves your whole widely accepted theory doesn’t it? Does the similarities of Pizza show there was one language 8000 years ago that branched out? Or does it prove that these people have been in contact with each other for the last hundred? If we assume it was one people then it must be even older because Koreans use the same word and that’s even further away

Be realistic, there is no basis for what you are saying

daddyjones

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As a native English speaker who'd never heard of this word - TIL x2

FrankTheHealer

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Me neither lol. Ive lived my whole life in Ireland for context. I've seen and heard smoked salmon plenty of times but never lox

echodot

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What does smoked salmon sound like?

FrankTheHealer

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It sounds like a nice topping on a bagel

Asafum

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Stupid economy...

I LOVE a lox and cream cheese bagel, maybe even some onion on it.

I HATE a $15 bagel...

funkless_eck

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schlp schlp schlp

MammyWhammy

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I'm from the South East US and never heard of it until we had neighbors move in next to us from the North East when I was like 13.

Fog0555

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Liquid Oxygen? Wow I didn't know it was that old. ::: spoiler disclaimer This is sarcasm. :::

AA5B

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Ancient Sumerian refrigeration technology was seriously underrated: -297°F was no problem for them

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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.

agressivelyPassive

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German already calls it Lachs.

GissaMittJobb

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And in Swedish it's Lax. Pretty sure it's Laks in Norwegian as well.

cabbage

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Indeed it is! And lax in Icelandic as well, which remains the closest to old Norse.

It's just the British trying to be fancy with their salmon.

v_krishna

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And Danish too (laks)

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Excellent. One step in the right direction. Good guy Germany.

loxdogs

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finally, I understand now, what means first part of my nickname, besides Liquid OXygen

v4ld1z

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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

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The English word comes from the Yiddish "laks," which comes from German. So while it is pronounced the same in English as it was 8,000 years ago, it was also introduced to English relatively recently, in 1934.

dangblingus

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So, the post is incorrect then?

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No. English is only around 1400 years old, so it's a given that the word was introduced from somewhere else. It's just surprising that it took well over a thousand years before it finally was.

SasquatchBanana

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What's the Great Vowel Shift?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

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tastysnacks

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Interesting. So the middle English vowel sounds were more consistent with like how the Japanese pronounced them

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Yes, as well as a lot of other languages. Spanish has a similar pronunciation to Japanese, I believe.

perishthethought

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I'm so glad all the best people from r***** came to lemmy. Thanks!

Got_Bent

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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)

ObviouslyNotBanana

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Gött med lax!

logi

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Gott með lax!

MxM111

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I blame horses for the words above.

ObviouslyNotBanana

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Det var konstigt

theywilleatthestars

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The most important words are the oldest

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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.

Infynis

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Or the newest. I definitely talk about shrinkflation a lot more than I imagine they did in 1530