Interesting! My daily breakfast is a couple of pieces of thin sliced smoked salmon with a bit of cream cheese spread on top and a few pieces of diced red onions.

https://getpocket.com/explore/...aning-in-8-000-years

The English Word That Hasn’t Changed in Sound or Meaning in 8,000 Years

The word lox was one of the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were, and where they lived.

One of my favorite words is lox,” says Gregory Guy, a professor of linguistics at New York University. There is hardly a more quintessential New York food than a lox bagel—a century-old popular appetizing store, Russ & Daughters, calls it “The Classic.” But Guy, who has lived in the city for the past 17 years, is passionate about lox for a different reason. “The pronunciation in the Proto-Indo-European was probably ‘lox,’ and that’s exactly how it is pronounced in modern English,” he says. “Then, it meant salmon, and now it specifically means ‘smoked salmon.’ It’s really cool that that word hasn’t changed its pronunciation at all in 8,000 years and still refers to a particular fish.”

How scholars have traced the word’s pronunciation over thousands of years is also really cool. The story goes back to Thomas Young, also known as “The Last Person Who Knew Everything.” The 18th-century British polymath came up with the wave theory of light, first described astigmatism, and played a key role in deciphering the Rosetta Stone. Like some people before him, Young noticed eerie similarities between Indic and European languages. He went further, analyzing 400 languages spread across continents and millennia and proved that the overlap between some of them was too extensive to be an accident. A single coincidence meant nothing, but each additional one increased the chance of an underlying connection. In 1813, Young declared that all those languages belong to one family. He named it “Indo-European.”

Today, roughly half the world’s population speaks an Indo-European language. That family includes 440 languages spoken across the globe, including English. The word yoga, for example, which comes from Sanskrit, the language of ancient India, is a distant relative of the English word yoke. The nature of this relationship puzzled historical linguists for two centuries.

In modern English, well over half of all words are borrowed from other languages. To trace how language changes over time, linguists developed an ingenious toolkit. “Some parts of vocabulary are more stable and don’t change as much. The linguistic term [for these words] is ‘a core vocabulary.’ These are numbers, colors, family relations like ‘mother,’ ‘father,’ ‘sister,’ ‘brother,’ and basic verbs like ‘walk’ and ‘see,’ says Guy. “If you look at words of that sort in different languages, it becomes fairly clear which ones are related and which ones are not. For example, take the English word for number two, which is dva in Russian and deux in French, or the word night, which is nacht in German and noch in Russian.”

“The sounds that change across time are unpredictable, and differ from language to language, and some may not happen to change at all.”

Analyzing the patterns of change that words undergo, moving from one language to another, showed how to unwind these changes and identify the possible originals. “Reconstructed vocabulary of Indo-European is based on a comparison of descendant languages,” explains Guy. “You collect words that mean more or less the same thing in all the languages, and if they look like each other in terms of their pronunciation, then it’s a good candidate for a descendant from a common ancestor.” The English word honey is madhu in Sanskrit and myod in Russian. Sanskrit and Russian haven’t shared a common ancestor since Indo-European, so these words had to come from the same source. (There are also the words mead in English, met in German and mjød in Danish that refer to an alcoholic drink made from honey.)

After discovering a word that might have existed in the Indo-European, linguists compared how its pronunciations changed from language to language. For example, sound [k] changes to [h] from Latin to Germanic, and the Latin word casa transforms into the English house while the French word cœur transforms into the English heart. With hints like that, linguists could undo the sound changes and trace the original pronunciation. In several thousand years, most words change beyond recognition, like the word wheel, which initially might have sounded “kʷékʷlos.” But there were some remarkable exceptions—like the timeless lox.

The family tree of the Indo-European languages sprawls across Eurasia, including such different species as English and Tocharian B, an extinct language once spoken on the territory of Xinjiang in modern China. In Tocharian B, the word for “fish/salmon” is laks, similar to German lachs, and Icelandic lax—the only ancestor all these languages share is the Proto-Indo-European. In Russian, Czech, Croatian, Macedonian, and Latvian, the [k] sound changed to [s,] resulting in the word losos.

This kind of millennia-long semantic consistency also appears in other words. For example, the Indo-European porkos, similar to modern English pork, meant a young pig. “What is interesting about the word lox is that it simply happened to consist of sounds that didn’t undergo changes in English and several other daughter languages descended from Proto-Indo-European,” says Guy. “The sounds that change across time are unpredictable, and differ from language to language, and some may not happen to change at all.”

The word lox was one of the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were, and where they lived. The fact that those distantly related Indo-European languages had almost the same pronunciation of a single word meant that the word—and the concept behind it—had most likely existed in the Proto-Indo-European language. “If they had a word for it, they must have lived in a place where there was salmon,” explains Guy. “Salmon is a fish that lives in the ocean, reproduces in fresh water and swims up to rivers to lay eggs and mate. There are only a few places on the planet where that happens.”

In reconstructed Indo-European, there were words for bear, honey, oak tree, and snow, and, which is also important, no words for palm tree, elephant, lion, or zebra. Based on evidence like that, linguists reconstructed what their homeland was. The only possible geographic location turned out to be in a narrow band between Eastern Europe and the Black Sea where animals, trees, and insects matched the ancient Indo-European words.

In the 1950s, archaeological discoveries backed up this theory with remnants of an ancient culture that existed in that region from 6,000 to 8,000 years ago. Those people used to build kurgans, burial mountains, that archaeologists excavated to study cultural remains. In that process, scholars not only learned more about the Proto-Indo-Europeans but also why they were able to migrate across Europe and Asia.

In turned out that, in the past, the grassy plains of steppe that run from Western China to the Black Sea had large herds of wild horses. Early humans hunted them for food, but the Proto-Indo-Europeans were probably the first people who domesticated the ancestors of modern-day domestic horses. That brought them an enormous advantage, allowing them to move a lot faster than any other human group. Then, they adopted—or, less likely, invented—wheeled vehicles and attached these to horses. “That’s probably the moment when they suddenly managed to expand into the Middle East, into India, and across Europe,” says Guy. “Within the next thousands of years, they expanded like no other human group that we know about in history. Because [now] they had mobility, which nobody else had.”

In his book The Power of Babel, Columbia University linguist John McWhorter wrote, “Everything about a language is eternally and inherently changeable, not just the slang and the occasional cultural destination, but the very sound and meaning of basic words, and the word order and grammar.” It’s nice to know, though, that some words never change—lox being one of the most surprising.

Indeed interesting!

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Originally posted by Pipe Smoker:
Indeed interesting!

If you ever get a chance to time travel you know what you can order to eat now

One of the very hardest of all college courses I took was the history of the English language. And I was studying molecular biology at the time.

There are three major phases of English: old English, middle English and modern English.

Old English was far too deep to go into with one one semester, so we focused on middle and modern.

That was a difficult class.

The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg contains a large collection of artifacts of the Scythian tribes, who inhabited the steppes of Eastern Europe and central Asia during the Bronze Age. The Altai is an area on the border between China, Russia, and Kazakhstan; grave mounds of nomads of Scythian origin have revealed beautifully worked gold items; but also preserved in permafrost were found a beautifully made rug, a four-wheeled cart, and mummies of high-born Altai people.

The Chinese suppress this, but the mummies found were clearly Caucasian and not Asian in appearance. We had the opportunity to see the "Altai Princess" who was kept (in poor conditions for preservation) in a museum in Novosibirsk for a while.

It's likely these nomadic "Scythians" spoke an Indo-european language; they traded with China, Greece, and Iran during the Bronze Age.

A link to the Hermitage website about the Altai findings:
Hermitage: the Altai People

And a link to another site that describes the rug and the cart found in a burial mound, and exhibited in the Hermitage:
Link

I would have thought lox is hebrew or yiddish.

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If you ever get a chance to time travel

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Originally posted by Rey HRH:
I would have thought lox is hebrew or yiddish.

I thought so as well. Very interesting article. One of my favorite authors is James A. Michener and his historical novels. I'll have to re-read his 'The Source' regarding the history of the Jews and Israel and see if lox is mentioned and his take on it.

Jim

quote:

Originally posted by Rey HRH:
I would have thought lox is hebrew or yiddish.

I'm pretty certain that Yiddish gets Lox from the German Lachs pronounced "lox", the word for Salmon in that language. It's a coincidence that the original word was Lox

Liquid oxygen

I'll have to be that guy....

8000 years? No.

6000 maybe at the outermost. 4500-5000 is more likely.

Furthermore, archaeological remains don't necessarily equate to a language group, so regardless of how old the remains are in the steppe, it doesn't mean those people spoke PIE.

The evolution of language is extremely fascinating. I was wondering if I went back in time in England how far back could I go and still be able to communicate verbally. Seems not very long.

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Originally posted by Ryanp225:
The evolution of language is extremely fascinating. I was wondering if I went back in time in England how far back could I go and still be able to communicate verbally. Seems not very long.

Verbally? 200-300 years, depending on how much ambiguity you can tolerate in pronunciation. The Great Vowel Shift from about 1400-1700 would make it very hard to understand spoken English. This is the reason there's so much weird spelling (or one of the reasons) in English, because the pronunciation of vowels changed dramatically in that time period.

That doesn't take into account any dialectical variants of English. I'm sure there are places in England (to say nothing of Ireland or Scotland) where the average American couldn't understand their dialect of English today.

BTW, that graphic is one I use in my classes every year!

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Originally posted by BamaJeepster:

quote:

Originally posted by Pipe Smoker:
Indeed interesting!

If you ever get a chance to time travel you know what you can order to eat now

FInd this guy, might need Tacfoley's help:

quote:

Originally posted by Ryanp225:
The evolution of language is extremely fascinating. I was wondering if I went back in time in England how far back could I go and still be able to communicate verbally. Seems not very long.

I'd say about the time of the Great Vowel Shift. You might get the gist of what Henry VIII was saying, but the syntax was certainly different. Out of London, and the upper levels of society, I doubt you'd have understood more than one word in ten. Can you easily read Chaucer? If so, then ignore the previous comments.

This is an excerpt from 'Gawain and the Green Knight' a long poem written in the mid-1300's....

See how you get on -

SIÞEN þe sege and þe assaut watz sesed at Troye,
þe bor3 brittened and brent to bronde3 and askez,
þe tulk þat þe trammes of tresoun þer wro3t
Watz tried for his tricherie, þe trewest on erþe:
Hit watz Ennias þe athel, and his highe kynde,
þat siþen depreced prouinces, and patrounes bicome
Welne3e of al þe wele in þe west iles.
Fro riche Romulus to Rome ricchis hym swyþe,
With gret bobbaunce þat bur3e he biges vpon fyrst,
And neuenes hit his aune nome, as hit now hat;
Ticius to Tuskan and teldes bigynnes,
Langaberde in Lumbardie lyftes vp homes,
And fer ouer þe French flod Felix Brutus
On mony bonkkes ful brode Bretayn he settez wyth wynne,
Where werre and wrake and wonder
Bi syþez hatz wont þerinne,
And oft boþe blysse and blunder
Ful skete hatz skyfted synne.

I didn’t make it past the 1st comma!
Thanks for posting that.

quote:

Originally posted by Oat_Action_Man:
BTW, that graphic is one I use in my classes every year!

Very interesting graphic!

Looked for Latin, but these old eyes couldn't pick it out. Did I miss it, or is it maybe implied in one of the branch names?

Interesting article, thanks for posting it. I'm enjoying the discussion.

quote:

Originally posted by tacfoley:
See how you get on -

I'll give it a crack. No searching, I swear. I love this stuff. I feel like I mangled a good bit of it, but the jist comes through. The declaration of a new king? Talking about the coming of prosperity after a nation-wide celebration? I did look up Troye afterwards and I figure they're talking about Troyes, maybe. I leave my guess unedited.

quote:

SIÞEN þe sege and þe assaut watz sesed at Troye,

See then the siege and the assault was seized at Troy,

quote:

þe bor3 brittened and brent to bronde3 and askez,

The boars(?) brightened and burnt to bronze asks

quote:

þe tulk þat þe trammes of tresoun þer wro3t

The talk that the [something] of treason they wrote

quote:

Watz tried for his tricherie, þe trewest on erþe:

Was tried for his treachery, the truest on Earth

quote:

Hit watz Ennias þe athel, and his highe kynde,

Here was Ennias the angel, and his high kind,

quote:

þat siþen depreced prouinces, and patrounes bicome

that season deposed princes, and patrons become (or became)

quote:

Welne3e of al þe wele in þe west iles.

Wellness of all be well in the west isles. (There was peace throughout the British Isles)

quote:

Fro riche Romulus to Rome ricchis hym swyþe,

From rich Romulus to Rome riches he swathe (He wrapped himself in fine clothes gifted from a Roman emperor?)

quote:

With gret bobbaunce þat bur3e he biges vpon fyrst,

With great penance(?) that bears he begs upon first

quote:

And neuenes hit his aune nome, as hit now hat;

And none but his own name, as he now has

quote:

Ticius to Tuskan and teldes bigynnes,

Ticius to Tuscan and told his bigness (greatness)

quote:

Langaberde in Lumbardie lyftes vp homes,

Langaberde in Lumbardie (Lombardy) lifts up him

quote:

And fer ouer þe French flod Felix Brutus

And forever the French blood King Brutus

quote:

On mony bonkkes ful brode Bretayn he settez wyth wynne,

On many banks (of rivers, I suppose) across Britain he sets with wine (He went all over England drinking and celebrating)

quote:

Where werre and wrake and wonder

Where war and wrath (or destruction is my guess) and wonder(ous things)

quote:

Bi syþez hatz wont þerinne,

The scythes has/hath wont therein (The scythes don't get to reap - nobody will be dying from war and famine or such now)

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And oft boþe blysse and blunder

And oft though they bliss and blunder (and often though they do good and bad)

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Ful skete hatz skyfted synne.

For [faith?] has skifted (lightened/lessened) sin.

quote:

Originally posted by P220 Smudge:
Interesting article, thanks for posting it. I'm enjoying the discussion.

quote:

On mony bonkkes ful brode Bretayn he settez wyth wynne

On many banks (of rivers, I suppose) across Britain he sets with wine (He went all over England drinking and celebrating)

That may be referring to Brittany (France)

The region’s name in modern French is Bretagne

Yeah, you're right. Like I said, I mangled plenty of it, but I got some of it right.