Re: Negation raising (was: introduction)

 --- Christian Thalmann wrote:

> German has two separate words for these two concepts: "denken" for the
> active use and "dünken" for the impersonal.  "Mich dünkt, dass..."
> means about the same as "Ich denke, dass...".  I imagine these could
> have been dialectal forms of the same basic word at a certain
> evolutionary stage.
It must be. Dutch has the same thing with "denken" and "dunken", for example:
"Wat dunkt U?" = "Was dünket euch?"
That they are two forms of the same basic word is, dunkt mij, proven by their
past tense:
denken - dacht
dunken - docht

I must add that "dunken" is considered a really old-fashioned word these days,
to such a degree that a great lot of young people don't even know it; I'm sure
a huge number of people, even educated people, don't know the past tense.

Jan

=====
"Originality is the art of concealing your source." - Franklin P. Jones

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