USAGE: enclitic -n = him/ it

On Monday, January 31, 2005, at 08:17 , Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Quoting Carsten Becker <naranoieati@...>:
>
>
>> (1) _'n_ appended to a verb can also mean "ihn" (him) in my
>> ideolect (_'ne_ in the regional dialect) or also "denn"
>>  ... but this is another story.
>
> Cool! I can't recall hearing this in German, but my Swedish lect does, on
> the
> surface, the same thing; it suffixes _-'_ to a verb for "him".
[snip]

> The enclitic _-n_ can also mean "it" as object, but whether this is a
> generalization of _han_ for inanimates
Very interesting. In the colloquial Sussex dialect of my youth we also
appended -n for 'him' and, more often, 'it'. I have always assumed that
this was a survival of OE masc. acc. _hine_ (the standard 'him' is from
the old dative), and that its use for 'it' was a generalization of -n.

Ray
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