THE OBJECTIVE INFINITIVE. 
235 
ally an accusative in Old High German; 1 forhten, an accusative of the thing or 
person feared and a genitive of cause; 2 gibiotan, a dative of the person and an 
accusative of the thing; 3 and beginnan, an accusative or a genitive. 4 In the 
series of two infinitives after gibot in Tatian 196.34, quoted above, as already 
stated, I think that the absence of inflection is due to its remoteness from the 
chief verb. In Tatian 83.6, the inflected infinitive may be due in part to the 
presence of the gerund in the Latin original. 
Purposely, again, I ignore the objective infinitive in Middle High German 
except to say that Dr. Monsterberg-Miinckenau, 1 1. c., p. 11, denies this use to 
Hartmann, though what others consider such infinitives are abundant therein; 
and that in Middle High German the confusion between uninflected and in¬ 
flected objective infinitives grows rapidly. 
In New High German the differentiation between the two is as difficult as 
in Modern English. 
In Old Saxon a similar interchange between the uninflected infinitive and 
the inflected infinitive is found after giuualdan: Hel. 5345, 5346: that ik 
giuualdan muot so thik te spildianne an speres orde, so ti quellianne an crucium, 
so quican latan . 5 In Old Saxon, uualdan governs the instrumental or the 
genitive, 6 but the exchange of uninflected for inflected infinitive in the pre¬ 
ceding example is probably due, not only to the double regimen of uualdan, 
but also to the remoteness of the third infinitive from the chief verb. In all 
probability the original construction was with the inflected infinitive. 
The following verbs have only the inflected infinitive as object in the Old 
High German texts discussed by Denecke: luston and lusten, ‘ desiderare 7 ; 
giflizzan, ‘studere 7 ; wizzan, ‘ cognoscere 7 ; argezzan , ‘oblivisci 7 ; sichbichnaan (?), 
‘ agnoscere 7 ; leren, ‘ docere 7 ; gizeihhanon, 1 demonstrare 7 ; farbiotan, 1 pro- 
hibere 7 ; and the following in Old Saxon, according to Steig, Z. c., pp. 491-494: 
bifelhan, 1 recommend 7 ; gemanagfeldian (?), ‘ multiply 7 ; linon, 1 learn 7 ; menian 
1 intend 7 ; thenkan , ‘ think, 7 1 think of 7 ; ruokan, 1 hope, 7 1 care 7 ; biodan, 1 com¬ 
mand. 7 Even a cursory examination of the examples in which these words 
occur, will show that in the main the inflected infinitive represents an ‘ indirect 
case 7 in the sense in which that term was defined above, in Chapter II, p. 61. 
As in the case of the subjective infinitive, so with the objective infinitive 
the statistics accessible to me are too incomplete to warrant speaking with con¬ 
fidence concerning the origin of this use in the Germanic languages other than 
Anglo-Saxon. But so far as it goes, the evidence seems to me to tend to show 
that the idiom is native in the languages considered, both with the uninflected 
infinitive and with the inflected infinitive, and for the same kinds of reason 
that were given in the discussion of the idiom in Anglo-Saxon. Moreover, the 
grounds of differentiation between the uninflected infinitive and the inflected 
infinitive, in the objective use, appear to be substantially the same in the Ger¬ 
manic languages in general as in Anglo-Saxon: in the main, the simple infini¬ 
tive only is used with verbs governing an accusative; the inflected infinitive 
only, with verbs governing an indirect case; both infinitives, with verbs of 
double regimen. 
The passive infinitive as object is very rare in the Germanic languages, and 
1 Delbriick, 2 l. c., p. 37. 
1 Ibidem, p. 38. 
2 Ibidem, p. 34. 
8 From Pratje, l. c., p. 73. 
3 Ibidem, p. 12. 
6 Delbriick, 2 1. c., p. 112. 
