Lexember Day 23 - egg white, egg yolk

As promised in the slide, nothing interesting about this entry today. What might be a little interesting, though, to make it worth your time for clicking on my link and making it to the blog – thank you, by the way, for encouraging my nonsense! – is the development of the word ‘egg’ in the various Germanic languages. 

The Proto-Germanic word for egg was *aiją (depending on your preference of transcription), and the particular sequence of VijV (as well as VuwV) caused something called Verschärfung – also known as Holtzmann’s Law – to occur in North and East Germanic. In West Germanic, not much happened to it, and it eventually became Ei in German and Dutch, and, for a while, it was ey in English until it was eventually replaced in the 17th century by the Norse word which became our modern egg. There is a well-known Middle English text by William Caxton about the confusion of what eggs are called. “Sheffelde, a mercer, cam in to an hows and axed for mete and specyally he axyd after eggys, and the goode wyf answerde that she could speke no Frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry, for he also coude speke no Frenshe, but wolde have hadde egges; and she understode hym not. And thenne at laste a-nother sayd that he wolde have eyren. Then the good wyf sayd that she understod hym wel.”

Because of North Germanic Verschärfung, that intervocalic /jj/ became /ggj/, and was responsible for the Old Norse term egg, which was borrowed into northern English and gradually worked its way down. 

In East Germanic, meanwhile, Verschärfung instead caused intervocalic /jj/ to become /ddj/, and became Griutungi *addi. It was likely also *addi in Gothic, which eventually gave rise to Crimean Gothic ada.

Around the time of Old Valthungian, a geminate-deletion rule caused this sequence to break down to ahdi, and then in Middle Valthungian, the H was assimilated and the vowel lengthened giving rise to the modern form āde (ādi‑ in compounds).