244 THE INFINITIVE IN THE OTHER GERMANIC LANGUAGES. 
sative with the infinitive after verbs of mental perception in Old High German 
(chiefly from Tatian and Notker) and of the accusative with predicate parti¬ 
ciple in Old High German, declares, l. c., p. 32: “The persistence of the con¬ 
struction after these verbs of perception in Middle High German is an indica¬ 
tion of its genuine Germanic character.” On the same page he adds: “ The 
accusative with infinitive after verbs of speaking is hardly found outside of 
Tatian and Notker, but we are not therefore justified in attributing it to Latin 
influence, since plentiful analogies exist in other Germanic dialects; ” by which, 
I presume, he intends to refer to the Gothic and to the Old Norse. Indeed, 
Dr. Zeitlin goes so far as to declare that the accusative and infinitive in subjec¬ 
tive clauses is also a native development in Old High German: see p. 246 below. 
So holds Professor Wilmanns, who, in his Deutsche Grammatik (1906), declares 
it difficult to determine how far the construction was native in High German 
(“ wie weit er im Hochdeutschen heimisch war ”) because of the diversity of 
usage by Otfrid and by Notker; who allows that Notker “ unter dem Einfluss 
des Lateinischen den Gebrauch der Konstruktion fiber seine ursprfingliche 
Grenzen hinausgetrieben hatte; ” who allows that Latin influence is evident in 
the Middle High German writers and in some New High German authors; but 
who adds, on p. 121: “ Aber wie stark auch die Einwirkung der lateinischen 
Schulsprache gewesen sein mag, so hat man doch anderseits zu bedenken, dass 
auch dem Germanischen von Anfang an der Akk. c. Inf. nicht fremd war, und 
dass man keinen Grund hat, ffir den ahd. Gebrauch so enge Grenzen vorauszu- 
setzen, wie wir im Heliand und im Ags. finden.” 
But despite the eminence of some of these advocates of the theory that this 
construction was native to Old High German and despite the cleverness of some 
of their arguments, they do not seem to me to upset the interpretation given 
above, based as it is on abundance of material, gathered from various texts by 
various scholars of acknowledged accuracy and acumen. 
In his monograph (1875) above quoted from, Dr. Apelt has shown that the 
so-called genuine accusative and infinitive is very rare in Middle High German, 
and, when found, is probably due to Latin influence. In New High German 1 
the idiom is very rare, though, as Dr. Herford has shown in his “ Ueber den 
Accusativ mit dem Infinitiv im Deutschen ” (1881), not so rare as has occasion¬ 
ally been stated. 
In Old Saxon 2 a few examples are found after verbs of mental perception, 
but none after verbs of declaring: Hel. 807 \fundun ina sittean an them uuiha; — 
ib. 4771: fand sie that barn godes slayen; ib. 1590: that thu us bedon leres. 
In a word, the situation in the Germanic languages as a whole is quite sim¬ 
ilar to that in Anglo-Saxon: the accusative and infinitive is quite common after 
verbs (1) of commanding, (2) of causing and permitting, and (3) of sense percep¬ 
tion ; 3 but is relatively rare after verbs (4) of mental perception, and is practi¬ 
cally unknown after (5) verbs of declaring, except in the closer translations. 
It is probable, therefore, that the idiom is native to the Germanic languages 
when occurring after verbs of groups (1), (2), and (3), and after a few verbs of 
group (4); but that it is due to foreign influence after some verbs in group (4) 
and after all verbs in group (5). Under the separate languages above I have 
1 See, too, Wilmanns, l. c., p. 121, for an excellent brief statement as to the idiom in New High German; 
also Blatz, l. c., II, pp. 557-569. 
2 See Pratje, l. c., pp. 71-72; Steig, l. c., pp. 480, 482^83. 
3 Except in Gothic: see above, p. 241. 
