New use of "unless"?

[Gregory {Greg} Downing]

At 11:10 AM 1/23/2001 -0500, Beverly Olson Flanigan wrote:
>[re "unlest"]: I would assume the /t/ is added as liaison with the following
>vowel, as in "acrosst", "oncet", "twicet," etc.--common in much of the Midland.
>
>But I suppose "lest" alone (re: Salovesh) is derived from "unless" too,
>which suggests the usage of both has a long history.
>

OED2 traces "lest" to an OE phrase that contains the ancestor of "less," and
traces "unless" to a ME phrase containing "less" that looks as if it
collapsed into a single word during the 15th century. So, "lest" and
"unless" are, strictly speaking, cousins rather than parent/child.

OED2 has entries for "unlest" and "unleast." All citations seems to be from
the 16th century, so the phenomenon of speakers fusing unless/unle(a)st/lest
is probably not new, and may well have persisted for centuries in the spoken
rather than the formal written language.


Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu