See back formation and morphological reanalysis in their full glory at this hilarious post (it would be worthless without the picture!) by Mark Liberman at Language Log. And while we're at it, has anybody ever heard/used "an ahundred" (from the second part of the post)?
Posted by languagehat at October 26, 2006 08:29 PMI'm pretty sure I've heard elementary school-aged kids use it.
Posted by: Bridget at October 26, 2006 09:33 PM"A hundred" is just another way of saying "one hundred", and presumably "He got a one hundred on the test" is okay, right? I don't think I've ever said "an a hundred", but I can't completely exclude the possibility.
How would you read "He got a 100 on the test"? Would you really read "100" as just "hundred"? Are there any other contexts in which you'd read it that way?
Posted by: KCinDC at October 26, 2006 11:42 PMI'd go so far as to say that I think I've used/heard "an ahundred" more than just "a hundred", but only in similiar contexts, as a noun. Just my two cents worth.
Posted by: tehgeekmeister at October 27, 2006 02:42 AMTwo ahundred rups for a bottle of fake poo is certainly not correct.
Posted by: Siganus Sutor at October 27, 2006 03:44 AM... but if it is genuine, it might be worth the money:
Zoo auctions tiger poo
http://www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/display.var.914877.0.zoo_auctions_tiger_poo.php
“The park believes it will scare off cats and foxes if placed in people's gardens.”
How would you read "He got a 100 on the test"? Would you really read "100" as just "hundred"?
Yes, I really would, because the written form is just a representation of the spoken sentence "He got a hundred on the test." If it were simply written "He got 100," it would be ambiguous between "a hundred" and "one hundred"; the a is needed for disambiguation.
Posted by: language hat at October 27, 2006 08:42 AMGoogling "an ahundred" and "an a-hundred" turn up quite a few hits, actually, even allowing for the written dialect pronunciations where "an a hundred" turns out to be "and a hundred" or even "than a hundred". It doesn't seem to be formal anywhere, though. I can't say whether I've ever said it - who pays attention? - but I'm pretty sure I've heard it. I think "He's got a temperature of an a hundred and two" sounds quite familiar. I don't think anyone I know would write it, though. Heck, isn't that what numerals are for?
Posted by: The Ridger at October 27, 2006 08:55 AMOnly now do I realise that in some languages there is neither “a” nor “one” to mark the unity. For example it's il a eu cent (not “un cent”) or une longueur de mille millimètres, and it's when they are two or more that the hundreds and thousands literally begin to be counted — deux cents dollars, trois mille mots, etc.
Incidentally, what's the difference between “a hundred” and “one hundred”? I've counted several times on my fingers and each time I've had the same result.
Posted by: Siganus Sutor at October 27, 2006 09:27 AMI always say "That's a whole nother story, with the "whole" inserted into "another", but I have never dared write it even though I've often wanted to.
I also have seen a Sono-English sign "Danger / Wei Xian" where the English word was treated as a binome, "Dan + Ger".
Posted by: John Emerson at October 27, 2006 10:33 AMThe Slavic languages don't count a single hundred or thousand either. In German it's regional (I, in Austria, never say "einhundert"). In Chinese -- uh, Mandarin, anyway -- it's obligatory, BTW; this may be related to the fact that for 200 or 2000 the form of "2" that goes with classifiers is used, not the ordinary numeral.
The "a whole nother" phenomenon may not be unique. In my dialect it is usual to say what translates at "a such a".
Posted by: David Marjanović at October 27, 2006 12:37 PMI always say "That's a whole nother story
Me too, and for a long time I didn't even realize it was "wrong" -- it just sounded so natural! I presume that's the case with the "an ahundred" folks, but that one sounds strange to me.
Posted by: language hat at October 27, 2006 02:01 PMFanf***n'tastic. Just another example of re-ordered words becoming other words. Another whole story of a whole other story.
Posted by: zhoen at October 27, 2006 02:46 PMIsn't that tmesis?
Posted by: Jimmy Ho at October 27, 2006 02:55 PM"Isn't that tmesis?"
Dang, beat me to it. One of the finest words in the lexicon.
Posted by: Conrad at October 27, 2006 05:39 PMActually the most bothersome example for me, for some irrational reason, is insertions in the middle of "half an hour"--"I've waited half a bloody hour" is all wrong--what you would really want is "I've waited half a bloody n'our".
Posted by: Conrad at October 27, 2006 05:41 PMBattle Hymn of the Republic, Julia Ward Howe
"I have seen him in the watchfires of an hundred circling camps"
(What will I be capable of when I've had TWO coffees this morning?)
Posted by: maureen at October 28, 2006 06:07 AMThat's just the standard traditional treatment of h- as a vowel; you see it throughout 19th-century works.
Posted by: language hat at October 28, 2006 08:52 AMTo paraphrase an old chestnut: "Sham poo for my real friends and real poo for my sham friends."
If you haven't heard the original, here's a hint: it's a toast.
Posted by: Ben at October 28, 2006 06:46 PM"The Slavic languages don't count a single hundred or thousand either." In formal Russian, "одна тысяча" can be used, but not so with сто. (Unless it's одна сотня, where сотня is a noun indicating something made up of a hundred units.)
"That's just the standard traditional treatment of h- as a vowel." As mute, perhaps?
Posted by: Alexei at October 30, 2006 05:03 AMYes, exactly.
Posted by: language hat at October 30, 2006 10:41 AMHm, funny. "An ahundred" really doesn't sound unnatural to me, at least in the cases he's used it in. I wonder if I've used it...!
Posted by: Ryan at October 30, 2006 11:08 AMIf it doesn't sound funny to you, you almost certainly have, I'd say.
Posted by: language hat at October 30, 2006 01:21 PMOK, I'm a college professor and I hear "an a hundred" a lot with respect to grades. I think it is an extension of the usage "an A," "a B," "a 93" etc. In this case "a hundred" is not used as a quantity but as a grade. It only sounds funny because of the reduplicated article: "I got a one hundred on the test" doesn't (I think) set off our language-error radar in the same way. Some proof of this may be in the fact that I've never heard the article used when grades are expressed as a percent ("I got 83 percent" not "I got an 83 percent").
Posted by: xiaolongnu at October 30, 2006 03:33 PMJust caught myself saying "an ahundred dollar bill" ;)
Posted by: Ryan at December 4, 2006 01:17 PM