Split infinitives—did Old English have them?

Question

I've read a few articles as well as questions on this site about splitting infinitives. In the Wikipedia article, it claims: > In Old English, infinitives were single words ending in -n or -an (compare modern Dutch and German -n, -en). Gerunds were formed using "to" followed by a verbal noun in the dative case, which ended in -anne or -enne (e.g. tō cumenne = "coming, to come").I read a bit on the use of infinitives in Old English; apparently, Old English has a to-infinitive that became Modern English infinitive. For example, the following sentence from (I think) Alfred's English translation of "Consolation of Philosophy":> he wilnað good to habbanne ond mid goode to bionne."He wills good to have and mid good to be"Since the infinitives, "to habbanne" and "to bionne" are also two words, did the English speakers back then ever think of putting an adverb between them? For example, would Alfred or Bede have written something along the line of this:>he wilnað good to ā habbanne ond mid goode to sælige bionne. "He wills good to forever have and mid good to happily be"It seems English texts from that time don't contain this kind of sentences, but would it have been considered correct?What about other Germanic languages?

Answer 1

So to be clear, we split our infinitives all the time. The reason that people have cautioned you against it is that education began to formalize in England beginning in about the early 1700's through the increased ease of access to printed materials like grammar books. The teaching of Latin was a greater concern than was English, and in Latin, you cannot split your infinitives. Educators, wishing both to raise the purchase of English and to better prepare their students for Latin, decided that splitting infinitives was bad. Basically, we still hold onto this 'rule' in English because different grammar handbooks have sustained it without understanding its history. In modern English, one of the primary reasons that we split our infinitives is because of the cadence: splitting them more often results in iambs than not.

I know nothing about Old English. Another will have to jump in. If Old resembles Modern as far as syntactic capabilities, my guess would be yes.