Today, roughly half the world’s population speaks an Indo-European language. In 1813, Young declared that all those languages belong to one family. A single coincidence meant nothing, but each additional one increased the chance of an underlying connection. 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. Like some people before him, Young noticed eerie similarities between Indic and European languages. The story goes back to Thomas Young, also known as “The Last Person Who Knew Everything.” 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. How scholars have traced the word’s pronunciation over thousands of years is also really cool. “Then, it meant salmon, and now it specifically means ‘smoked salmon.’ It’s really cool that that word hasn’t changed its pronunciation at all in 8,000 years and still refers to a particular fish.”
“The pronunciation in the Proto-Indo-European was probably ‘lox,’ and that’s exactly how it is pronounced in modern English,” he says. There is hardly a more quintessential New York food than a lox bagel-a century-old popular appetizing store, Russ & Daughters, calls it “The Classic.” But Guy, who has lived in the city for the past 17 years, is passionate about lox for a different reason. One of my favorite words is lox,” says Gregory Guy, a professor of linguistics at New York University.