PREDICATIVE INFINITIVE WITH ACCUSATIVE SUBJECT. 
247 
active infinitive with a noun object, as in Mat. 27.64: halt nu witan pamma 
hlaiwa = KeXevcrov ovv acrcfiaXicrOrjvaL tov Tacf>ovI 
In Old Norse, also, the construction is quite rare. 
In Old High German, likewise, the idiom is rare, and is due to the Latin: 
Tatian 183.32: gilimphit inan varan inti thruoen inti arslagan wesan inti arstan- 
tan = oportet eum ire et pati et occidi et resurgere; 2 ib. 171.6: laz eer thiu kind 
gisatoliu werdan — sine prius saturari filios . 3 The passive infinitive is oftener 
translated by the active, as in Tatian 199.7: wenan wollet ir iu fon thesen zwein 
forlazzan ? = quem vidtus vobis de duobus dimitti f 4 See, too, under “ the in¬ 
flected infinitive with accusative subject,” p. 248 below. 
In Old Saxon we habitually have, not the passive infinitive with accusative 
object, but the active infinitive with objective accusative, as in Hel. 527: 
gihordun uuilspel mikil fon gode seggean. Steig, l. c., p. 309 fl\, holds that in 
such expressions the infinitive, though active in form, is passive in sense, and 
that the accusative is the subject, not the object, of the infinitive; but, for rea¬ 
sons given above, in Chapter II, pp. 29 f., this seems untenable to me. I have 
not found an example of the compound passive infinitive with accusative sub¬ 
ject in Old Saxon. 
It seems probable, therefore, that this idiom was imported into the Germanic 
languages from the Greek and the Latin. 
II. THE INFINITIVE INFLECTED. 
Although Grimm, l. c., IV, p. 130, declares, “ Sicheres kennzeichen der con¬ 
struction des acc. cum inf. ist, dass sie nie die prap. zu vertragt,” it seems to 
me that in the Germanic languages we occasionally come upon an accusative 
with a prepositional infinitive that is almost, if not quite, identical with an 
accusative with an uninflected predicative infinitive. Concerning possible ex¬ 
amples of the idiom in Anglo-Saxon, I have spoken in Chapter VIII. I here 
add a few words concerning the construction in the other Germanic languages. 
One apparent, if not real, example of the prepositional infinitive with an 
accusative subject occurs in Gothic in correspondence with the same construc¬ 
tion in Greek: I Thes. 2.12: weitwodjandans du gaggan izwis wairpaba gups! 
= papTvpovpevot eh to TreparaTeiv vpas d^iws tov Oeov. 5 But usually the Greek 
idiom is avoided, as in II Thes. 1.5: taikn garaihtaizos stauos gups du 
wairpans briggan izwis piudangardjos gups = eh evhevypa tt}s SiKaias Kpiae^ rod 
Oeov , eh to KaTa^noOrjvcu vpas Trjs Ba.cnA.etas tov Oeov . 6 
In Old Norse, apparently, the prepositional infinitive was not used with 
accusative subject, though in earlier Danish it was occasionally so used: see 
Nygaard, l. c., p. 235; Falk and Torp, l. c., p. 201, where Danish examples are 
given; Lund, l. c., pp. 381 ff.; Delbriick, 3 Z, c., p. 355. 
In Old High German, in sentences like the following, Tatian 196.34: gibot 
inan ther herro zi vorkoufanne inti sina quenun inti . . . inti vorgeltan = jussit 
eum dominus venundari et uxorem ejus et . . . et reddi , 7 apparently we have an 
inflected infinitive with an accusative subject, and the phrase is the object 
1 From Streitberg, 2 l. c„ p. 208. 2 From Denecke, l. c., p. 42. 
« Ibidem, p. 35. 4 From Apelt, 2 l. c., p. 5. 
5 Bernhardt, 2 l. c., p. 114, seems to consider that the infinitive phrase here is subjective, but surely it is 
objective. 6 See Apelt, 1 1. c., p. 292. 7 From Denecke, l. c., p. 65. 
