Re: THEORY: Evolution of infixes/ablaut?

Steg Belsky wrote:

> Would the splitting of the word "another" into "a - nother" (instead of
> "an - other") in the phrase "a whole nother" be infixing, or just
> reanalysis of which word the /n/ belongs to?
The latter.  You have to have bound morphemes before you can start
talking about infixation (or free morphemes if it's a root).  "Whole" here
is a free morpheme -- it's not morphologically limited to being placed
after the article "a/an".

What you're talking about, incidentally, has happened quite often before.
Modern English "apron" used to be "napron";  "orange" used to be
"norange" (cf. Spanish <naranja>, IIRC).   In both of those cases, it was
the reverse of the one you mention:  the /n/ gravitated to the article, so that
"a norange" becomes "an orange", etc., but qualitatively the same kind of
process.

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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