Today I Learned

fucking got me, good one

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

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.

Try reading it differently.

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

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

It's not a loan word, it's the word for salmon in the oldest constructable ancestor of English.

Oldest word [used] in the English language

Not oldest English word.

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

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.

What's the Great Vowel Shift?

Many people call it lox. You can too!

"Laks" in Norwegian. "Røykalaks" is smoked salmon

The German word for salmon is "Lachs" but it's pronounced "Lax". I wonder who had the word first