Today I Learned
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
view the rest of the comments
It's not a loan word, it's the word for salmon in the oldest constructable ancestor of English.
According to etymonline,
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.
Exactly it predates the English language, lots of words do.
The English language is basically a neglected toddler by linguistic standards, it was left alone in a closet to fend for itself
Edit:
Also funny you just said it's the word for salmon...
Instead of you know, salmon...
Laks just meant "fish" in the proto languages.
Which is why OPs link doesn't mention the spelling not changing, and why it's wrong about the meaning not changing too
Going from "any type of fish, living or dead" to "specific type of fish when prepared by smoking"
Seems like a pretty significant change in meaning to me
I think by that logic almost all words in every language predate the language they are part of. Like saying that our noses aren't really human because noses predate humans.
What do you mean by this?
As island-based languages go English is probably the least isolated in history. It's Germanic relatives are all nearby. Britain has had extensive links to the continent for the entire history of English and well before. It's an international language and has been for hundreds of years.
English also isn't that weird just because it got a large infusion of (pretty closely related) Norman words after 1066. Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese all have over half their lexical items from Chinese, an unrelated language.
The majority of the English language, it was only spoken by commoners with no formal education.
Literally never went to school or learned how to read or write.
Which is why it's one of the hardest languages to learn, there wasn't even a noble population who were helping rules be set logically, it's a slang language.
Which is why it's almost impossible to credit the English language with any words except for things invented by English speakers.
Other languages weren't as bad at it
And it's not a huge deal...
Until someone claims an English word has existed for 8,000 years unchanged.
Then it's worth pointing out how ridiculous that claim is.
You're describing every language for the overwhelming majority of the last 150,000+ years. English is not unique in that.
It's not. English has a lot of irregularity to remember, but not the most. How difficult you find a language depends on your native language. English lacks things like elaborate case structures or grammatical gender which can be hard unless your native language has something similar. The 'th' sound is rare, but there are no clicks or tones. SVO is not the most common word order, but it's not the rarest.
Huh? That's not how having a nobility works. Or what slang is. The rich aren't more logical, and they aren't concerned with making language easier. If anything nobles want more arcane language that takes longer to learn to better differentiate themselves from those with less free time.
It sounds like you're thinking of the prescriptive grammar movement where from the 1700s or so rich English speakers decided if it's not possible in Latin then it's uncouth in English, and started making up nonsense rules like no split infinitives or ending sentences with a preposition. They couched it in terms of being logical and correct but it was in reality a novel way of marking social class. And ~700 years after the English peasant/Norman aristocrat divide.
Name a single language that didn't have an aristocracy that knew how to read and write and learned formalized Grammer for the majority of that languages history.
I didn't read anything else you didn't understand after that first bit tho.
I can help a little, but I'm not teaching an etymology class over here.
You do realize more than half of the world's ~7,000 languages still have no writing system, right?
😂 I'm going to be generous and assume you're just trolling now and don't seriously believe this.
Cool...
I'm going to continue to not use emojis and take a quick step to make sure I never try to help you understand something again.
Everyone wins!
Which languages had nobles changing the rules of the language to be logical, and beat the peasantry until they repeated their absurd shibboleths?
Proscriptivists have existed in many languages, English included. They've basically always been tilting at windmills.
Governments tend to be most effective at killing languages wholesale, rather than systemically changing grammar. And it's something that's been far more effective in the past couple hundred years as part of nation- building projects. E.g. the efforts of France, Italy and Spain to squash minority languages like Occitan, Galician or Neapolitan.
Is that what people aren't understanding?
When a language had nobles that knew the rules for the language, those rules were documented and maintained, even tho commoners didn't use it.
Later, when education caught on, the commoners were taught correct grammar, spelling, and usage. Not what earlier generations of commoners used.
It's not that they enforced grammar at the time, it's that we know about those languages is primarily from nobles writing shit down in that language.
No one was writing English for centuries
Ah, yes, that's why the French still speak perfect Latin.
Yes, old grammar textbooks have been an incredibly important resource for linguists, particularly for reconstructing ancient pronunciations. They're useful for teaching historians etc. Old French or whatever.
But we generally haven't been terribly successful at beating students into using obsolete grammar rules and to stop using modern grammatical innovations.
Please stop with those silly linguistic allegories about English made by people who have no idea how other languages works.
Get out of here with your reasonable, scientific explanation!
We want our outrage porn about smoked salmon, dammit!
/s