Eggs Were of Different Form in Old English

The great Englishman Caxton, who introduced printing in Britain in1476, wrote in a preface to one of the books about a funny episode with eggs. The thing is that in Old English the word egg had a different form which was spelled as ey in Middle English; its plural form was eyren. And again the Scandinavians brought with them to Britain their word egg. It first spread in the northern English dialects, the southerners did not know it and used their native word.

Caxton tells the readers that once English merchants from the northern regions were sailing down the Thanes, bound for the Netherlands. There was no wind and they landed at a small southern village. The merchants decided to buy some food. They came to a house and one of them asked a woman if she could sell them eggs. The woman answered that she didn’t understand him because she didn’t know French. The merchant became very angry and said he didn’t speak French either. Then another merchant helped. He said they wanted eyren, the woman understood him and brought them eggs.

For rather a long period of time two words existed in Britain: a native English word eyren was used in the South, and the Scandinavian borrowing eggs in the North. The Scandinavian word has won after all, as you can see.

The French Adorned the English Table. Thanks to William the Conqueror!

Many food names in English are French borrowings. After the Norman Conquest under William the Conqueror (1066) French words began to enter the English language increasing in number for more than tree centuries. Among them were different names of dishes. The Norman barons brought to the English their skill.

Learners of the English language notice that there is one name for a live beast grazing in the field and another for the same beast when it is killed and cooked. The matter is that the English peasants preserved Anglo-Saxon names for the animals thy used to bring to Norman castles to sell. But the dishes made of the meat got French names. That is why now we have native English names of animals: ox, cow, calf, sheep, swine, and French names of meals from whose meat they are cooked: beef, veal, mutton, pork. (By the way, “lamb” is an exception, it is a native Anglo-Saxon word.) A historian writes that an English peasant who had spent a hard day tending his oxen, calves, sheep and swine probably saw little enough of the beef, veal, mutton and pork, which were gobbled at night by his Norman masters.

The French enriched English vocabulary with such food words as bacon, sausage, gravy; then: toast, biscuit, cream, sugar. They taught the English to have for desert such fruits as: fig, grape, orange, lemon, pomegranate, peach and the names of these fruits became known to the English due to the French. The English learned from them how to make pastry, tart, jelly, treacle. From the French the English came to know about mustard and vinegard. The English borrowed from the French verbs to describe various culinary processes: to boil, to roast, to stew, to fry.

One famous English linguist exclaimed: “ It is melancholy to think what the English dinner would have been like, had there been no Norman Conquest! ”