All Things Linguistic

“And he asked specifically for eggs, and the good woman said that she spoke no French, and the merchant got angry for he could not speak French either, but he wanted eggs and she could not understand him. And then at last another person said that he wanted ‘eyren’. Then the good woman said that she understood him well.”

Extract from Caxton’s ‘egges’ story1490 via the British Library

Not quite an Easter Egg, but perhaps one of the most important egg-based stories about English.

William Caxton was famous for bringing a printing press to London, and starting the print industry for English. Caxton faced a challenge though, which variety of English should he publish? The ‘egges’ story, published in the introduction to one of his translations, shows just how

Below is a summary of some of Caxton’s work from Wikipedia:

He is credited with printing as many as 108 books, 87 of which were different titles, including the first English translation of Aesop’s Fables (1484). Caxton also translated 26 of the titles himself. His major guiding principle in translating was an honest desire to provide the most linguistically exact replication of foreign language texts into English, but the hurried publishing schedule and his inadequate skill as a translator often led to wholesale transference of French words into English and numerous misunderstanding.

I also like this slightly snarky summary of the egges story from the same page:

In the 1490 edition of the prologue to Virgil’s ‘Eneydos’, Caxton refers to the problems of finding a standardised English. Caxton recounts what took place when a boat sailing from London to Zeeland was becalmed, and landed on the Kent side of the Thames. A mercer called Sheffield who was from the north of England went into a house and asked the “good wyf” if he could buy some “egges”. She replied that she could speak no French. This annoyed him, as he could also not speak French. A bystander suggested that Sheffield was asking for “eyren” and the woman said she understood that. Aside from the insight into linguistic diversity in 15th Century England, it also demonstrates that there were then, just as now, rude and unhelpful people. After recounting the interaction, Caxton wrote “Loo what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte egges or eyren? Certaynly it is harde to playse euery man by cause of dyuersite and chaunge of langage.” (“Lo, what should a man in these days now write: egges or eyren? Certainly it is hard to please every man because of diversity and change of language.”)

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