Ancient eggcorns

Language Log 2023-06-17

The word eggcorn was originally proposed in a LLOG post almost 20 years ago — "Egg corns: folk etymology, malapropism, mondegreen, ???", 9/23/2003.  And the word is now recognized by most current English dictionaries and other relevant sources, which gloss it variously, e.g. —

  1. the  Oxford English Dictionary, ("An alteration of a word or phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements as a similar-sounding word")
  2. Merriam-Webster: ("a word or phrase that sounds like and is mistakenly used in a seemingly logical or plausible way for another word or phrase either on its own or as part of a set expression")
  3. Wiktionary: ("A word or phrase that sounds like and is mistakenly used in a seemingly logical or plausible way for another word or phrase either on its own or as part of a set expression")
  4. the Collins English Dictionary: ("a malapropism or misspelling arising from similarity between the sound of the misspelled or misused word and the correct one in the accent of the person making the mistake")
  5. the American Heritage Dictionary, ("A series of words that result from the misunderstanding of a word or phrase as some other word or phrase having a plausible explanation")
  6. Wikipedia: ("An eggcorn is the alteration of a phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements, creating a new phrase having a different meaning from the original but which still makes sense and is plausible when used in the same context")

Those sources cite the examples eggcorn, to the manor born, old-timers' disease, ex-patriot, for all intensive purposes, feeble position, free reign, wipe board, card shark, and so on. Many more can be found at Chris Waigl's Eggcorn Database.

This morning, I'm appealing for help in answering two questions: What are some examples of eggcorns in other languages? And what are the earliest documented (or reconstructed) examples?

Eggcorn psycholinguistics guarantees there have been eggcorns as long as there have been languages. I suspect that the documentation of linguistic history includes many examples, and historical-comparative reconstruction contributes others. Contemporary usage must provide examples from every language and variety around the world. But I'm ashamed to say that I  can't think of any non-English examples — commenters no doubt will fill the void

As for the history, the oldest (maybe?) documented example that I know of (if we allow folk etymologies to stand as evidence of widely-adopted eggcorns) is jerusalem artichoke, which the OED glosses as

A species of sunflower, Helianthus tuberosus, native to North America and widely cultivated for its edible, knobby, tuberous roots

…with citations back to the 17th century:

1620 T. Venner Via Recta vii. 134 Artichocks of Ierusalem, is a roote vsually eaten with butter, vinegar, and pepper. 1641 R. Greville Disc. Nature Episcopacie i. iv. 16 Error being like the Jerusalem-Artichoake; plant it where you will, it overrunnes the ground and choakes the Heart.

What's the eggcornality here? Wikipedia explains

Despite one of its names, the Jerusalem artichoke has no relationship to Jerusalem, and it is not a type of artichoke, though the two are distantly related as members of the daisy family. Italian settlers in the United States called the plant girasole, the Italian word for sunflower, because of its familial relationship to the garden sunflower (both plants are members of the genus Helianthus). Over time, the name girasole (pronounced closer to [dʒiraˈsuːlə] in southern Italian dialects) was corrupted by English-speakers to Jerusalem. An alternative explanation for the name is that the Puritans, when they came to the New World, named the plant with regard to the "New Jerusalem" they believed they were creating in the wilderness.

In support of the girasole (= "turn sun") hypothesis, Wikipedia cites James Edward Smith, An Introduction to physiological and systematical botany (1807), who footnoted the term thus:

A corruption, as I presume, of the Italian name Girasole Articiocco, sun-flower Artichoke, as the plant was first brought from Peru to Italy, and thence propagated throughout Europe.

That seems plausible, since Tobias Venner, the author of that 1620 citation, was English — and the Mayflower didn't arrive in Massachusetts until 1620. But again, there must be many examples from thousands of years ago in the documented history of Mesopotamia, China, India, Persia, Egypt, etc., as well as even older examples from reconstructed parent languages. (Though  these ancient examples, again,  will mainly be "folk etymologies" that we can take as originally eggcorns….)