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

On Tue, 12 Oct 2004 15:28:50 +0100, Jan van Steenbergen
<ijzeren_jan@...> wrote:

> --- Thomas R. Wier skrzypszy:
>
>> > So is this where 'methinks' comes from?
>>
>> No, actually, _methinks_ is an ancient construction, in which the
>> experiencer is treated as a kind of oblique (Dative in OldEng), and
>> the verb agrees with the NP motivating the experience.
>
>In Dutch it exists too in the form of "mij dunkt", which means
>exactly the same. And German has the, presumably ancient, verb
>"dünken", as in "Was dünket euch?".
In German, at least, this verb (common in Switzerland but old-fashioned
elsewhere) is rather of the kind of "gefallen": It requires a grammatical
subject, but this subject isn't the experiencer, which on his part is also
required:

"Deine Sprache gefällt mir." (Thy language pleases me-DAT [actually "to
please" is one of the few English verbs that work in the same way])

"Deine Sprache dünkt mich gut." (Thy language seems me-ACC good.)

Don't be distracted by the fact that the subject of "dünken" is often a
subordinated clause:

"Mich dünkt, deine Sprache ist gut." (Me seems, thy language is good: It
seems to me that your language is good.)

There's also a marginal use of "gefallen" without animated experiencer,
but that shouldn't distract us either from the main use with obligatory
experiencer:

"Erlaubt ist, was gefällt." (Licit is what pleases. [Is that one
grammatical English?])

The implicit experiencer is something like "to the people".

gry@s:
j. 'mach' wust

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