{"id":9862,"date":"2019-05-20T01:00:59","date_gmt":"2019-05-20T08:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=9862"},"modified":"2019-05-19T14:55:29","modified_gmt":"2019-05-19T21:55:29","slug":"8000-year-old-lox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2019\/05\/20\/8000-year-old-lox\/","title":{"rendered":"8,000-year-old Lox"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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The English Word That Hasn\u2019t Changed in Sound or Meaning in 8,000 Years<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

BY SEVINDJ NURKIYAZOVA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The word<\/em>\u00a0lox\u00a0was one of the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were, and where they lived. <\/em>Photograph by Helen Cook \/ Flickr<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

One of my favorite words is\u00a0lox<\/em>,\u201d says Gregory Guy, a professor of linguistics at New York University. There is hardly a more quintessential New York food than a lox bagel\u2014a century-old popular appetizing store, Russ & Daughters,\u00a0calls<\/a>\u00a0it \u201cThe Classic.\u201d But Guy, who has lived in the city for the past 17 years, is passionate about lox for a different reason. \u201cThe pronunciation in the Proto-Indo-European was probably \u2018lox,\u2019 and that\u2019s exactly how it is pronounced in modern English,\u201d he says. \u201cThen, it meant salmon, and now it specifically means \u2018smoked salmon.\u2019 It\u2019s really cool that that word hasn\u2019t changed its pronunciation at all in 8,000 years and still refers to a particular fish.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How scholars have traced the word\u2019s pronunciation over thousands of years is also really cool. The story goes back to Thomas Young, also known as \u201cThe Last Person Who Knew Everything.\u201d 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 \u201cIndo-European.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, roughly half the world\u2019s population speaks an Indo-European language. That family includes 440 languages spoken across the globe, including English. The word yoga<\/em>, for example, which comes from Sanskrit, the language of ancient India, is a distant relative of the English word yoke<\/em>. The nature of this relationship puzzled historical linguists for two centuries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. \u201cSome parts of vocabulary are more stable and don\u2019t change as much. The linguistic term [for these words] is \u2018a core vocabulary.\u2019 These are numbers, colors, family relations like \u2018mother,\u2019 \u2018father,\u2019 \u2018sister,\u2019 \u2018brother,\u2019 and basic verbs like \u2018walk\u2019 and \u2018see,\u2019 says Guy. \u201cIf 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<\/em>, which is dva<\/em> in Russian and deux<\/em> in French, or the word night<\/em>, which is nacht<\/em> in German and noch<\/em> in Russian.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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from Nautilus The English Word That Hasn\u2019t Changed in Sound or Meaning in 8,000 Years BY SEVINDJ NURKIYAZOVA One of my favorite words is\u00a0lox,\u201d says Gregory Guy, a professor of linguistics at New York University. There is hardly a more quintessential New York food than a lox bagel\u2014a century-old popular appetizing store, Russ & Daughters,\u00a0calls\u00a0it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9862\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}