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An English Word That Hasn’t Changed in Sound or Meaning in 8k Years
- jb1991 6y agoOnline journalism confuses me. This article has a publication date of today. But I swear I read this exact article a while back. Was it merely re-published to make it look current? Update, sure enough, it was previously published at least 1.5 years ago: http://nautil.us/blog/the-english-word-that-hasnt-changed-in-sound-or-meaning-in-8000-years http://nautil.us/blog/the-english-word-that-hasnt-changed-in...
- yorwba 6y agoAnd it was discussed back then, complete with complaining about the various inaccuracies of the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19900346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19900346
- sorokod 6y agoFun fact, the following are cognate and share a PIE uncestor: Yard, Garden, Garten(german), Gorod(russian), Ogorod (russian)
- s_gourichon 6y agoJardin (French)
- dang 6y agoNautilus does that, unfortunately.
- pmiller2 6y agoI won't spoil the article entirely, but I will say I thought the word might have been "ship," but I was wrong.
- soneil 6y agoiirc (eg, second hand from the book "the adventures of English") ship came from norse skip, via the same sound-shift that separates shirt and skirt - but is why the K in the term skipper.
- pmiller2 6y agoThat sounds correct to me. In Old English, the word is spelled "scip," pronounced the same as "ship," and quite close to how "skip" is pronounced in Old Norse. Old Norse and Old English were actually mutually intelligible, BTW, kind of like modern day Swedish and Norwegian.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- vidanay 6y agoI would have gone with "no".
- sk5t 6y agoMy guess was 50/50 between "house" and "food."
- renewiltord 6y agoWord is "lox". Meant "salmon". Now means "smoked salmon".
- ajay-b 6y agoThank you for saving us a click.
- readarticle 6y agoPlease don’t use this as an excuse to miss this article. The lede isn’t even slightly buried (“lox” is the 7th word of the article), it’s just used to present the main topic, i.e. Proto-Indo-Europeans. It’s not a click saved, it’s a click lost if you don’t already know of the Kurgan Hypothesis.
- azepoi 6y agoto this day "lax/lachs/laks" still means salmon in most germanic languages.
- nailer 6y agoIf you're into Proto Indo European, check out Ridley Scott's Prometheus - David the android is learning PIE from a computer program at the beginning of the film, and Peter Weyland speaks to the Engineer in PIE.
- gfaure 6y agoWhile PIE-inspired, the dialogue there was not recognisably related to any PIE reconstruction -- check out https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4008 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4008 for more on this.
- gadders 6y agoI might not have changed in sound or meaning, but in English English in England it is very, very rarely used. We might know what it means from US TV, but you'd never see it on a menu* or supermarket label. Does it still count if it's fallen out of use? * I realise someone will google and find it on a UK menu now.
- OJFord 6y agoGravadlax/gravlax is common though.
- usrusr 6y agoMakes me wonder whether it has actually survived in English, in that culinary niche, or was just readopted from some other language that immigrated to America in parallel and happened to bring a dish with them that was named after the word for the animal in that language. Kind of similar to how livestock remained Germanic in English when the meat dishes derived from them migrated to French/Latin roots. Ironically triggered by Normans who only switched from a Germanic language to French a few generations earlier (at most). Languages are entirely unlike species, they keep cross-fertilizing whenever they are not physically isolated.
- Izkata 6y agoPersonally, I'm kinda leaning towards a cross between readopted and persisted through trivia (akin to how everyone knows "a group of crows is called a murder" despite not typically being used in normal speech, but more locale-specific than that example): Chicago area, I know I've encountered "laks", I think I've seen "lachs", but I don't recall "lox" at all.
- stephenr 6y agoI’m more interested in why the re-use of the same word to mean orange the colour and orange the fruit happens in different languages. Other fruits are orange. No other colour is named the same as a fruit.
- freeone3000 6y agoPlum, peach, and grape are all color-names, and naming colors after a natural item was and remains common. Orange was derived the same way -- from the fruit. Prior to the 1500s, when the fruit was introduced to England, things were described as "saffron-red", "yellow-red", or simply "red" when we would today call them orange. (There's a really interesting perceptual thing going on here -- if you don't have a word for a color, you don't perceive the color: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/hoffman_01_13/ http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/hoffman_01_13/ ) As for non-English: you can trace the spread of the fruit across the Mediterranean by tracking the word appearance. But this only works for European languages... Because Asian languages have a word for orange unrelated to the fruit! In Chinese, the word remains "saffron".
- stephenr 6y agoI don’t believe I’ve ever heard those first three used as a colour. Also the double use of orange does carry into at least one Asian language (which is why it strikes me as a weird similarity): Thai. Even weirder is what is most commonly available as an “orange” in Thailand isn’t really orange on the outside - they have mottled green/orange skin.
- filleduchaos 6y ago> I don’t believe I’ve ever heard those first three used as a colour. That's a bit unusual - plum and peach in particular are so common in use as colours that they're part of the HTML colour names (as `peachpuff` and `plum`). Even if you haven't, surely you've heard of lime, olive, tomato, etc being used as colours?
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- rozab 6y agoI'd never heard the word 'lox' before (British). Etymonline[0] suggests that it arrived in American English in the 20th century via Yiddish. So I guess technically the English word has only existed for <100 years :( [0]: https://www.etymonline.com/word/lox https://www.etymonline.com/word/lox
- crx07 6y agoAmerican here. I have a larger vocabulary than probably 99% of people, including multiple regional and ethnic dialects, but I have never heard or seen this word in my entire life.
- oh_sigh 6y agoThat may put you in the minority then, because I know I've heard lox referred to in national pop culture shows like Seinfeld. I always assumed that people would have at least a passing knowledge of it, even if only that it was just salmon that you ate with breakfast.
- sk5t 6y agoYou may be giving yourself a little too much credit here; I expect more than a quarter of people in the northeastern US would know what "bagel and lox" is. Almost everyone who is not a stranger to a Jewish delicatessen would know.
- floatrock 6y agoNew Yorker here. I suggest you add "any New York deli or bagel shop" to your 99th percentile list of multiple regional and ethnic dialects.
- saalweachter 6y agoThe population of NYC alone is 2.5% of the US population; the New York Metropolitan Area, about 6%.
- DanBC 6y agoFrom OED: > lox, n. 2 > (lɒks)Pl. lox, loxes.[f. Yiddish laks, f. G. lachs salmon.] > lox, n. 2 > A kind of smoked salmon. > 1941: S. Longstreet Last Man around World xii. 135 “Listen, you lox-eater—until last year you thought herring was the only thing they took from the sea.” > 1950: F. Allen Let. Oct. in G. Marx Groucho Lett. (1967) 73 “At the stage delicatessen..the lox is running good and the cream cheese is spreading easily.” > 1961: B. Malamud New Life (1962) 121 “I'll bet lox to bagels that Gerald will get more for the department.” > 1969: A. Glyn Dragon Variation ix. 293 “He..folded himself on to a stool at the counter, and ordered coffee and a bagel with lox.” > 1972: Times 21 July 12/8 “Where in Paris,..can one enjoy a breakfast of beigles, lox (Yiddish for salmon) and cream cheese?” > 1973: Daily Colonist (Victoria, B.C.) 16 Sept. 35/5 “The bagel..often is eaten with smoked salmon or lox from Nova Scotia.”
- jachee 6y agoAlong similar lines, I think it would behoove us English speakers to change the word "pineapple" to the word that's nearly universal in other languages: ananas.
- sk5t 6y agoPerilously close to "bananas" - like, what if "apples" and "epples" were two unrelated fruits?
- jachee 6y agoYou mean like tomato and potato? Or (chile) peppers and (black) pepper? Or artichokes and Jerusalem artichokes? Personally, I think "ah-nah-NAHS" wouldn't be very confusing with "Buh-nan-uhs", at least when speaking. I'll concede that I can see it getting a bit ambiguous in text, though.
- sk5t 6y agoFor robustness we might assign a higher edit distance to an add/delete of a letter as compared to a letter substitution. There are "tomato" and "potato" but no "otato" or "omato". Maybe Jerusalem artichoke is known as a sunchoke in the US for a reason, I dunno. :)
- pazimzadeh 6y agoOn the subject of similarities between Indic and European languages, I've noticed a few similarities between English and Farsi (Farsi spelled our with Latin text): Lip - Lab Vocal - Vacal Brother - Baradar Brother - Dokhtar Better - Beitar Bonuses: Man - Adam Tight - Tang Dead - Mord Desert - Sahraii (aka Sahara) There are probably a lot more..
- vchak1 6y agoCreate in English, Krit in Sanskrit, ecrit in French. Death is Mrit in Sanskrit, and morte in French. Is is astu in Sanskrit, Ast in Farsi (if I recall correctly).
- um304 6y agoDeath is "Merg" in Farsi, which sounds similar to "morgue". You're correct about "ast".
- s_gourichon 6y agoIn French, "écrit" corresponds to "written", not "create". Stays relevant somehow. "Create" translates to "Créer".
- um304 6y agoMore Farsi words: Father - Pider Mother - Maader Daughter - Dukhter Dozen - Dawazda God - Khoda One - Yek Two - Do Three - Se Four - Chehar Five (Penta)- Punj Six - Shush Seven (Sept) - Heft Eight (Oct) - Hesht Nine - Neh Ten - Deh No - Neh Tree - Drekht Moon - Mah Foot - Paa Orange - Naranji
- dilippkumar 6y agoIsn’t Farsi a daughter language descended from the Proto-Indo-Iranian language family? A little off topic: I remember reading this interesting oddity connecting the Avesta and Vedic religions. Quoting from source [0] > Pandemonium is Jaan Puhvel’s word for the mutual demonization that occurred when Zarathustra demonized the Gods of the Sanskrit speakers, and the Sanskrit speakers (Rig Vedic priesthood) demonized the Gods of the Zoroastrians (Avestan speakers) in turn. Conspicuous examples are the Devas and the Ashuras. Sanskrit speakers referred to the Devas as good Gods and the word devi, deva is a word for ‘a god, any god,’ whereas the Ashuras are demons in later Sanskrit literature. The Zoroastrians used the word ahura (cognate with Sanskrit ashura) as a word for ‘a god, any god,’ and Ahura Mazda is their highest God, whereas the daevas (cognate with Sanskrit devas) were demonized. [0] http://piereligion.org/pandemonium.html http://piereligion.org/pandemonium.html