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From: riddle@ut-sally.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: A norange and a whole nother story.
Message-ID: <2136@ut-sally.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 19-Jun-85 13:24:48 EDT
Article-I.D.: ut-sally.2136
Posted: Wed Jun 19 13:24:48 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 21-Jun-85 02:56:33 EDT
References: <14800002@ism70.UUCP> <394@bu-cs.UUCP> <502@ucsfcgl.UUCP> <705@asgb.UUCP> <135@iclbra.UUCP> <668@lsuc.UUCP> <593@umd5.UUCP>
Reply-To: riddle@ut-sally.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle)
Organization: U. of Tx. at Houston-in-the-Hills
Lines: 30
Re: Infix?
Bloody-Nother: "Bob"

>> For an interesting side topic, why is it "a whole nother" rather than the
>> more logical "an whole other"?  Perhaps because of the pain it causes to
>> say "an whole", and your amygdalus/angular gyrus rearranges the syllables
>> to shift the "n" from before the "whole" to after it?

If only I could remember all that literary and linguistic terminology that I
learned in high school English!  You see, the switch "an other" <=>
"a nother" is a common and well known one, and there is a standard term for
the process.

The most famous example in English is the word "orange", which I have heard
was once "norange".  The only dictionary I have at hand doesn't concur that
there was ever such a word in English, but the word underwent a similar
transformation somewhere along the line in any case.  The etymology in
front of me at the moment:

	[ME & OFr "orenge"; Pr. "auranja" (with sp. influenced by L.
	"aurum", gold and loss of initial "n" through faulty
	separation of article "une") < Sp. "naranja"; Ar. "naranj";
	Per. "narang"]

The word "another" has undergone/is undergoing a similar process.  One place
you see evidence for it is in phrases like "a whole nother story;" you also
see it in the writings of children and other people who haven't had spelling
conventions throughly pounded into them, as in the epithet, "You're a
nother!"

--- Prentiss Riddle ("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada.")
--- {ihnp4,harvard,seismo,gatech,ctvax}!ut-sally!riddle
--- riddle@ut-sally.UUCP, riddle@ut-sally.ARPA, riddle%zotz@ut-sally