Re: Negation raising (was: introduction)

On Thu, 2002-08-01 at 15:51, Jan van Steenbergen wrote:
>  --- 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.
Old English, I believe, had 'þinc' and 'þenc'. I don't know which was
which, but I'd presume 'denken' and 'þenc' would be equivalent. But the
same change that made 'English' /INglIS/ and 'enque' 'ink' made the two
merge, evil Middle (or Early Modern?) English speakers that they were.

Tristan