anyone have any idea what the 'of a' is doing in 'a little bit more esoteric of a language'? i definitely wouldn't put it there if it was just 'a more esoteric language'.
I have no idea what it's doing there.
Originally, you'd get adj+art+noun constructions simply due to the word order being more flexible early on, and this surviving as a relict construction. In particular, it tends to be when there's an adverb, which, as it were, pulls the adjective out to the left. So, "a nice man", but "much nicer a man"; "a loud parrot" > "somewhat too loud a parrot".
The some of the 'adverbs' had the overt form of a noun and preposition, with its own article, giving a double-article construction: "a great deal nicer a person", "a lot bigger a boat".
This then presumably got confused with double-article constructions where there is no adjective, but just a noun to which the main noun is a genitive: "a glimmer of a chance", "a whale of a time". [appositive cases like the latter themselves being an extension from cases like the former, which are genuinely genitive in meaing]. This confusion gives us the non-standard construction with two articles and 'of': *"a great deal nicer of a person", *"a lot bigger of a boat".
Then, in voidwalker's post, it seems there's
another layer of confusion, in which this new double-article-and-genitive construction is confused with single-article constructions, giving them a second article (and a genitive) too, to give expressions like **!*"a more exotic of a language". (where Standard English has either "a more exotic language", or the somewhat archaic but still found in some syntactic contexts "more exotic a language").
void's construction may also be influenced by confusion with comparatives, which look similar but with definite articles : "the larger of the two".
Syntax is weird.
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Speaking of which, I would have written this post in Irish, to honour the intent of the thread... but I can't. Because a) I'm terrible at language-learning, and b) Irish is insane.