A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE WORDS AGAIN AND AGAINST,
WITH AMIDST, ACROSSED, AND WHILST BEING THROWN IN FOR GOOD MEASURE
By Anatoly Liberman
There are two questions here. First, why does again rhyme with den, fen, ten rather than gain? Second, where did -t in against come from? I’ll begin with against.
Old English had a ramified system of endings. The most common ending of the genitive was -s, which also occurred as a suffix of adverbs, or in words that, by definition, had no case forms at all (adverbs are not declined!). It is easy to detect the traces of the adverbial -s in such modern words as always, (must) needs, and nowadays, and its obscure origin will not interest us here. Some adverbs ending in -s were used with the preposition to before them, for example, togegnes “against” (read both g’s as y) and tomiddes “amid.” They competed with similar and synonymous adverbs having no endings: ongegn and onmiddan. As a result, the hybrid forms emerged with -s at the end and a “wrong” prefix: ageines and amides. Initial a- in them is the continuation of on-; hence our modern forms against and amidst. So far, everything is clear. The tricky part is final t.
Obviously, this -t has no justification in the early history of either against or amidst. According to the usual explanation, both words so often preceded the definite article the that -sth- was simplified (“assimilated”) to st. This explanation is plausible. By way of analogy, it may be added that a similar process has been postulated for the verb hoist. It surfaced in English texts in the 16th century in the form hoise, and all its native predecessors and cognates elsewhere in Germanic look like it. Perhaps the infinitive was changed under the influence of the preterit and the past participle (as in the now proverbial to be hoist with one’s own petard), but, not inconceivably, in the phrase hoise the flag the same process occurred as in ageines the/amides the. (I have seen the conjecture that -st goes back to the superlative degree of adjectives. This reconstruction is fanciful.)
However, t also developed in words that did not always precede the definite article. Thus, earnest “pledge money,” a noun with a long an intricate history, was first attested in the form erles. Here the influence of the all-important adjective earnest, from Old Engl. earnost, should not be ruled out. Tapestry is another borrowing from French (tapisserie; compare Engl. on the tapis, literally, “on the table cloth,” a calque of French sur la tapis: tapis and tapestry are of course related). The inserted t in tapestry is called a parasitic sound that developed between s and r—not much of an explanation, even though it is possibly true. Whilst is from whiles, which, like against, had no historical -t. Both words seem to have developed along similar lines, but the troublesome consonant may be �