Re: Dialect & accent (was: Announcement: New auxlang "Choton")

On Tue, 12 Oct 2004 18:54:43 +0100, Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:

>On Tuesday, October 12, 2004, at 03:07 , Trebor Jung wrote:
>
>> Ray írta: "A few older dialect relicts remain, e.g. in my native Sussex,
>> the
>> simple present tense affixes -(e)s for _all_ persons, not just the 3rd
>> singular."
>>
>> So is this where 'methinks' comes from?
>
>
>Nope!  [American]
>
>We'd never use 'me' I subject of a verb! The colloquial Sussex for "I
>think" is "I thinks".
>
>'methinks' is in fact Shakespearean and does _not_ mean 'I think'; it
>means "It seems to me". The 'me' part was originally the dative case and
>the verb is impersonal: "me thinketh" = 'it sees to me'.
>
>It survived as a set phrase in early modern English.
It must be noted that this usage originates in OE "ðyncan" (corresponding to
German "dünken"), whereas the verb "to think" originates in OE "ðencan"
(corresponding to German "denken"). The former is an ablaut of the latter.
How could we describe the semantic relation expressed by that ablaut?
"think" --> "make think"??? Do historical linguists even claim that a
regular semantic change corresponds to the ablauts?

gry@s:
j. 'mach' wust