| Morning, everyone. I remember reading an article that described one of the oldest root words in the Indo European family of languages. In case you don't know, Indo European languages include the majority of languages originating in Europe, Northern India, Iran, as well as al European languages. If you can read this, you read and speak an Indo European language. That word? Salmon. In "Proto-Indo European"—the progenitor of all the Indo European languages, the original language that the others splinted off from—the word for salmon was probably something like "lox." In German, it's lachs. In Icelandic, it's lax. In English, we call smoked salmon "lox." Pick an Indo European language and their word for salmon sounds very close to lox. It's cool because it shows that from the very beginning, people identified and likely extolled salmon, and that salmon maintained its primacy in all the cultures that followed. This is a fun exercise to do with etymology in general. What other words have been preserved? Fire is a big one. A study from 2013 found that the word for "fire" was very similar across four of the seven Eurasian language families. There's nothing quite like sitting around a fire at the end of the day, is there? It's universal, which the etymological thread running through otherwise disparate language families reflects. Sometimes the words change but you can still see the root relationship. For instance, the English word "fee" is derived ultimately from the Proto Indo European word for cattle, "peku." Most of the old Latin words involving money or wealth or payment were also derived from "peku." The word started out meaning "cows" and eventually morphed into meaning "money" (or "payment"). It makes sense, though, because there isn't much difference between cows and wealth. Having your own cattle is a kind of supreme wealth, isn't it? Meat. Milk. Manure for the crops. Mobility. This idea of "cattle=wealth" is preserved across many different cultures, even ones totally unrelated to the Indo European language family. Perhaps that's partly why we love red meat so much, why having a fridge full of steaks feels like prosperity, and even why red meat is so nutrient-dense. Everything is linked. It all lines up. Etymology can be illuminating. What are some other etymological examples that might reveal deeper meanings and relationships? Let me know in the comment section from Friday's New and Noteworthy. | 
