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

[Mark A. Mandel]

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.]