Background II

 I should have made this an earlier post; but I thought I ought to explain an idea or term used frequently in this blog: cognate. Cognate words are related words, because they come from related languages. Related languages are considered related because they descend from a common ancestor.

Thus, English and German are related and are both considered Germanic languages. The Scandinavian languages are related, but a little less closely: English and German and considered West Germanic languages, and the Scandinavian languages are North Germanic.

Scholars (usually considered linguists nowadays but at one time called philologists) conclude that two languages are related when they find that they share cognate words. Thus:

father (Engl), Vater (German), pater (Latin), piter (Greek)

There is a rule (or "law") to explain or describe the correspondence of an f- in the Germanic languages with a p- in Latin or Greek.

In reading my blog it may often be helpful if you're acquainted with German. (Unfortunately I think that not too many Americans learn German, possibly due to the hostility to German and Germany that resulted from World War II.)

The Anglo Saxons Had Bagels and Lox!

 

First, let's be sure we understand what cognate means. Two words that are cognate words, or simply cognates, are similar words because they are related; they come from related languages. Thus English father, German Vater, and Latin pater are all cognates because those three languages are all cognate, or related, languages.

Now: In Old English (or Anglo-Saxon, spoken from about 450 to 1100 AD), there was a word beag. It referred to strips of gold--perhaps like gold wire--that a chieftain would award to his followers and then they were wrapped around the wrist like a bracelet. This word is cognate with bagel, and you can see the resemblance between the objects denoted.

The Old English for salmon is lachs--pronounced with a guttural like the ch in German ich. This is very similar to lox, meaning smoked salmon, which was originally a Yiddish word.

Thus bagel and lox are both words with cognates in Old English, which is not at all surprising because Old English and Yiddish are cognate languages. They are both in the Germanic language family.