this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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Today I Learned

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it's also yummy

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago
  • Toasted Onion Bage
  • Cream Cheese
  • Lox
  • Fresh Tomato Slice
  • Capers
  • Salt and Pepper

Best breakfast ever

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

It's also a common abbreviation for liquid oxygen in rocket engineering.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

Try reading it differently.

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

So, the post is incorrect then?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What's the Great Vowel Shift?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

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)

[–] [email protected] 93 points 7 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

I’m proud of that one. Sometimes the stars and my ADHD align.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I heard they had a collab with a youtoobs channel that shows people how to become professional administrative employee, called "staff made here".

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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"?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

It's a bit like that youtoobz channel about how to die from electricity I think it's called ElectroTomb.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

There's lox to unpick there

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

God damn you down to the fireiest pits of hell.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

What does smoked salmon sound like?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

schlp schlp schlp

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It sounds like a nice topping on a bagel

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Stupid economy...

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

I HATE a $15 bagel...

:(

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

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

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