"A Whole Nother" and "Alls I Know Is"

[Beverly Flanigan]

Ah, yes, I remember that now.  Gee, I had three semesters of Old
English--but back in the Dark Ages!

At 02:17 PM 10/9/2006, Mark A. Mandel wrote:
>Bev wrote:
>     >>>>>
>
>"A whole nother NP" is common everywhere, I believe.  Isn't it a reanalysis
>of "an other" along the lines of "norange-->an orange" and (in reverse) "an
>uncle" or "mine uncle" --> Shakespeare's "nuncle"?  Liaison /n/ has
>shifted.  (I just explained "an" as an allomorph of "a" with liaison /n/ to
>my intro. grad class yesterday, and they were totally amazed!  Here, the
>consonant /h/ has broken up the normal liaison, but the /n/ is retained
>even though another consonant, /l/ now precedes the vowel in 'other'.)
>
>  <<<<<
>
>Historically, though, it's the other way around: "an" is from an
>unstressed form of "a-macron n", which meant simply 'one'. OED online says:
>
>A weakening of OE. án, ‘one’, already by 1150 reduced before a cons. to a.
>About the same time the numeral began to be used in a weakened sense
>(usually unexpressed in OE. as he wæs gód man, ‘he was a good man’; cf.
>Chron. 1137 ‘he wæs god munec & god man,’ and 1140 ‘he wæs an yuel man’);
>becoming in this sense proclitic and toneless, {abreve}n, {abreve}, while
>as a numeral it remained long, {amac}n, {amac}, and passed regularly
>during the next cent. into {omac}n, {omac}; see the prec. word. [And much,
>much more....]
>
>-- Mark
>[This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]

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