Iĉo:

ceigered:
Ekzemploj:

Cuman (come), infinitive

Cum! - "Love"
Þu cymst - You come/you're coming
Þu canst cuman - You can come
Þu fandast cuman - You're trying to come

Ic hafige (ge)cumen/Ic hafige acumen - I've come.

There's no "to"? I just saw something about "to + infinitive" arising in Middle English. Is that true? If it is, then German and English coincidentally adopted the same preposition as an infinitive marker independently, which is a strange coincidence. (Zu, pronounced like "cu" in Esperanto, is a cognate of "to", and is mainly used to indicate the destination of a movement)

Mmm good spotting, I didn't even read 'zu' in 'zu kommen'. As for whether it was in Old English, well, my Old English knowledge isn't too good. 'To' seems to have come from 'tō' (to, towards) for the senses of 'towards, for/in order to' etc so maybe they did evolve independently.

This wiki page mentions the development of the split infinitive and shows that somewhere in Old English, 'to' verb forms start appearing. Unfortunately it doesn't go into much more depth on the history. Another wiki article (here seems to point out that at one point there were no 'to's being used and it was just '-an' (or so I've gathered, having seen some proto-germanic before). Furthermore Swedish doesn't really use 'att' (to, in the sense of 'in order to') in the same way as the West Germanic languages (e.g. Jag vill äta frukost långsamt - lit. I want eat brekkie slowly) (however, 'att vara eller inte vara' - lit. to be or not be)*, and historically Old English and Old Norse and their offshoots have been close in some ways.

Add to that the amount of dialects of Germanic languages back in the day, and you could easily of had two systems in Old English, where some used 'to' while others (maybe in contact with Danes etc) may have simply used -an. I think the prevalence of '-an' forms might've been seen as being folkish or traditional, with 'to' forms being seen as more folkish/traditional after the Norman invasion.

Of course I wasn't there, so I'm speculating mostly .

*I forgot that your Swedish is probably much better than mine so you can tell me if I'm actually on the right track!

EDIT: Another problem is that German uses versuchen (used in your example, I think?) where as Ol' English uses fandian so maybe in this case they don't match?

Iĉo judging by your avatar you must have the coolest hairdo out of all english-teachers ever!

Alas, my hair is a little more conservative these days. Vidu. That photo is a couple of years old. I wish I could have kept the mohawk.

Let us hold a moment of silence in memory of the mighty mohawk.....

...

Done

Ok, I see what you mean (I knew will and vilja were cognates, but didn't think about whether that would affect the situation). But you said more or less what I was trying to get at, that Swedish (and no doubt Danish and Norwegian) use 'att' less than we use 'to' (unless we're talking about 'att' as in the conjunction) so it makes the whole backtracking 'to' kind of hard (for me at least)

And forseek (forsēcan /foɹ'se:tʃɑn/ ? )* is an excellent word, along with forstand . I haven't been doing any germanic languages for a while so I can't think of any more, but it'd be great to have a list of pseudo-anglified germanic vocabulary.

*EDIT: Just found out forsēcan is an actual OE word, meaning 'to seek with active intent, to attack'. A stab in the dark, maybe the 'for/ver' part (or other particles like that) have something to do with 'to/zu's presence...

mnlg:

As for "can" (and "must"), I was taught that form to be irregular, just like those verbs are (there is no "to can", right? and what is its future tense? .

"will be able to", as I was taught.

I know. My whole point was that the verb is irregular. (Elsewhere on the internets, someone would have just said whoosh

Yes, Italian has defective verbs as well, and I am familiar with the grammar. However, as you rightly say, irregularity is a superset of defectiveness.