The Secret Ways of Weak Forms: Here Comes a New ’Un

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You may find it surprising, but we have quite precise and insightful analyses of English pronunciation, complete with phonetic transcriptions, dating back to the sixteenth century. One exceptionally talented early phonetician, born centuries ahead of his time, was John Hart, the author of An Orthographie (1569), a treatise in which he advocated a spelling system that would reflect the pronunciation of the Tudor period faithfully by using as many symbols as there were contrastive speech-sounds, “and no more”. Hart left us numerous transcriptions of his variety of Early Modern English in the system he had devised. His testimony is highly reliable: we can be pretty confident that he pronounced whole, one and those with the same vowel, and that there was no initial /w/ in his pronunciation of one. Represented with the help of modern IPA symbols, his transcription of one  is /oːn/. Incidentally, he also had /ˈoːnlɪ/ for only, and in case you have not figured it out for yourselves, only = one + the suffix -ly, forming adjectives and adverbs.

We have to remember, however, that English has been (at least) as variable in the past as it is today. There is spelling evidence to show that some varieties of Middle English tended to insert a glide before any word-initial vowel, as if trying to force every word to begin with a consonant. The glide tended to match the features of the vowel, so we usually find the rounded back glide /w/ before rounded back vowels, including ME /ɔː/. Middle English scribes had no common standard to conform to, so they often used “ear-spellings”, revealing their pronunciation habits. We thus find occasional w-initial variants of words like ǭte ‘oat’, ǭth ‘oath’, ǭn ‘one’, ǭnes ‘once’, ǭnliche or ǭnlie ‘only’, ǭld ‘old’, ǭk ‘oak’, etc. The idealised “dictionary” spellings cited in the preceding sentence represent a Late Middle English “virtual norm” that didn’t really exist. The actual spelling was highly variable, and the documented variants include wote, woth, won, wonys, wonlyche, wolde, wooke, etc. None of these forms survived into mainstream Modern English, except, it seems, one and once (the modern spelling does not follow the mutated pronunciation).

What I think happened was that forms with an initial glide came to be stigmatised as regional or vulgar, and were avoided in “cultivated” speech. The exceptional pronunciation of one became fixed not in the full form employed when speaking slowly and distinctly, but rather in the reduced form used in unstressed positions when the word functioned as a pronoun – a colloquial pronunciation like /wʊn/ or /wən/, resulting from the phonetic weakening of /ˈwɔːn/ at an early date. There is also a /w/-less variant of such an informal weak pronunciation: Modern English /ən/, as in a good ’un (note, by the way, that both a and ’un have the same Old English ancestor!). A “sloppy” form hiding in unstressed positions apparently managed to escape the attention of purists, who naturally focussed on the elegance and clarity of formal speech. Words which had no weak forms (like ‘oak’ and the rest) lost the initial glide irreversibly. But stressed /ˈoːn/ (as recorded by Hart after the Great Vowel Shift) was paired with unstressed /wən/, in which the parasitic /w/ was able to survive.

Hat tip: The VoiceGuy
(and yet the weak often win)

One frequent scenario leading to the emergence of new irregular variants consists in the restressing of weak forms. When the Modern English indefinite article a/an is pronounced emphatically, it does not revert to its historical source but generates new stressed forms, such as /eɪ/, /æn/. Neither did /wən/ evolve back into /woːn/ when it was reinstated in stressed positions. It spawned new forms (possibly a variety of them) with a restored full vowel, such as /wʊn/, /wʌn/ or /wɒn/ (as in northern England). Those innovations began to compete with /oːn/ and with its descendant /oʊn/ – first as an alternative pronunciation of the pronoun under stress, then also in the numeral.  And weak forms can be formidable competitors. Their sheer frequency of use enables them to survive and repeatedly claim niches inhabited by their rarer if stronger counterparts. Eventually, the new pronunciation infected not only the numeral but also the related words once and none (the latter from ME nǭn, which continued OE nān = ne + ān ‘not one’); possibly also nothing (ME nǭn thing ‘not a/one thing’).

Less transparent derivatives and compounds containing OE ān were left intact and continued to develop regularly, which is why we still have /oʊ/ in only (OE ān-līċ ‘one-like’), alone (OE eall + āna ‘all solitary’), and atone (ME at-ǭnen, mirroring Latin ad-ūnō ‘unite’). When the replacement happened, they were already living their own independent lives, and their connection with one was not transparent enough to trigger analogical change.

The discussion would not be complete without mentioning the traditional Scots variants reflecting a ME form with unrounded /aː/ (OE /ɑː/ did not change into /ɔː/ in the Northern Middle English dialect ancestral to Scots and to some northern varieties of British English). Hence we have dialectal forms spelt ae or ane, and pronounced [eː], [en], or [jɪn], depending on the local accent. They are the more-or-less regular outcome either of Northern Middle English ān ‘one’ or of its by-form in which the final /n/ was dropped.