Learn English – Do words “iron” and “irony” have anything in common

How—or rather, when—did these fused words come into existence

I ran Google Books searches for the fused forms of eleven three-piece words—albeit, forasmuch, hereinafter, hereinbefore, howbeit, inasmuch, insofar, thereinafter, whatsoever, whosoever, and wheresoever—for the period 1600–1900, to identify when the earliest matches appeared. Here are the results I obtained (first occurrence in parentheses):

albeit (1601)

forasmuch (1601)

hereinafter (1685)¹

hereinbefore (1733)²

howbeit (1601)

inasmuch (1585/1612)

insofar (1687)³

thereinafter (1775)

whatsoever (1589)

whosoever (1611)

wheresoever (1603)

---

¹Orlando Bridgman, Conveyances, consisting of legal documents drawn up at various times prior to 1674, consistently renders hereinafter as herein after.

²A statute enacted in 1729 under George II appears to render the term as herein before.

³A Scottish assembly declaration in 1581 and another in 1596 (cited in the same source) use in so far.

Google Books search results aren't rigorous: The underlying database isn't exhaustive, and OCR errors prevent Google Books searches from noticing all occurrences that actually occur. Still, the results I compiled do suggest a couple of things. First, people writing in English have been using fused forms for a long time; and second, the fusion of such words didn't occur all at once. Seven of the fused words are attested in Google Books matches from not later than 1611, but the other four occur for the first time in Google Books matches from 1685–1775. The latecomers were hereinafter, insofar, hereinbefore, and thereinafter.

Why did the fusion take place?

You might expect that the fused form inasmuch as emerged in contradistinction to the open form in as much as as a way of crystallizing some difference in meaning between the two forms—but I haven't found any evidence that such a thing happened. Another possibility is that the phrase appeared so often in certain ritualistic documents (such as deeds of conveyance) that scriveners came to think of insofar as single entity and so began to render is as a single fused word instead of as three separate words.

Henry Fowler & Francis Fowler, The King's English (1906) takes a very dim view of modern (in 1906) use of the term inasmuch as (and similar phrases) in a subsection titled "Compound prepositions and conjunctions":

The increasing use of these [compounds] is much to be regretted. They, and the love for abstract expression with which they are closely allied, are responsible for much of what is flaccid, diffuse, and nerveless, in modern writing. They are generally, no doubt, invented by persons who want to express a more precise shade of meaning than they can find in anything already existing; but they are soon caught up by others who not only do not need the new delicate instrument, but do not understand it. Inasmuch as, for instance, originally expressed that the truth of its clause gave the exact measure of the truth that belonged to the main sentence. So (from the Oxford Dictionary):

God is only God inasmuch as he is the Moral Governor of the world.—SIR W[ILLIAM] HAMILTON [1860]

But long before Hamilton's day the word passed, very naturally, into the meaning, for which it need never have been invented, of since or because. ... The best thing we can now do with inasmuch as is to get it decently buried; when it means since, since is better; when it means what it once meant, no one understands it.

Henry Fowler, Modern English Usage (1926) is even less charitable toward in so far [as or that]:

in so far. He must have a long spoon that sup with the devil; & the safest way of dealing with in so far is to keep clear of it. The dangers range from mere feebleness or wordiness, through pleonasm or confusion of forms, & inaccuracy of meaning, to false grammar.

Presumably, Fowler would have greeted the fused form insofar with garlic, mirrors, and crosses.

The Ngram chart for "inasmuch as" (blue line) versus "in as much as" (red line) for the years 1900–2000 shows that the fused form is still considerably more common in English writing than the open form and that it has been so for at least 200 years:

"Insofar" (blue line) versus "in so far" (red line), tracked over the same period, presents a very different case: The open form for many years dominated usage, and not until 1971 did the fused form pass the open form in Google Books frequency:

Looking at these two charts, I speculate that the fused form insofar became popular simply because it imitates the established form inasmuch. At any rate, I can't see any other consideration that would tend to promote the closed form insofar at the expense of the open form in so far.

At the start of words like gnaw

Yes, at the start of some words like gnaw. Even though the G in gnaw is “silent” in present-day English, it used to represent a consonant sound. So originally, the "GN" in this word wouldn't have been a "digraph" so much as a consonant cluster (albeit a special kind of consonant cluster: the sounds are "tautosyllabic" or in the same syllable). As the spelling suggests, the consonant cluster is thought to have originally been pronounced as [gn], although it may have developed other realizations in certain time periods.

The distinction in pronunciation between words starting with gn- and words starting with n- seems to have been lost sometime in the early Modern English time period (An Introduction to Early Modern English, by Terttu Nevalainen (2006), says the change of gn- to /n/ was "completed in the south in the eighteenth century", p. 128).

In the middle of some compound words like hangnail

There are also some compound words made from native elements that are spelled with -gn-, such as hangnail.

"G" itself isn't very frequent in non-word-initial position in native English vocabulary because of sound changes

The /g/ sound is a bit rare outside of word-initial position in native English vocabulary because it was historically vocalized in many contexts to /j/ or /w/.

The vocalization of G to /j/ (in palatalizing contexts) had already occurred by the time of Old English (at least, in West Saxon dialects), so the letter "G" in Old English spellings could represent the palatal glide /j/ (we have evidence for this from spellings that use G unetymologically to represent /j/ that did not originate from the Proto-Germanic *g sound; e.g. the word for year, cognate to German Jahr, was spelled with the letter G in old English). The Old English word regn that Laurel's answer mentions was probably pronounced something like /rejn/.

The vocalization of G to /w/, which occurred later, seems to have developed via rounding of earlier /ɣ/. An example is the Modern English word owner which the OED says had spellings like agenere, agnere, and ahnere in Old English. The Bosworth-Toller entry is at ágnere.

The pronunciation of "-gn-" as /gn/ is not inconsistent with Latin, or even French origins for a word

The pronunciation of -gn- as /gn/ in many Latinate words is based on spelling (and also partly on certain traditions for pronouncing Latin, which may have themselves have been based on spelling): it doesn't have much if anything to do with Germanic. Note that even though -gn- is pronounced as /ɲ/ most of the time in French words, there are actually some learned French words where /gn/ is used, such as ignition and stagnation.