The English Word That Hasn’t Changed in Sound or Meaning in 8,000 Years
nautil.us
The word lox was one of the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were, and where they lived.Photograph by Helen Cook / Flickr 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 […]

it’s also yummy

  • Pipoca@lemmy.worldEnglish
    38·
    1 year ago

    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.