Newsgroups: sci.lang
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From: jcf@world.std.com (Joseph C Fineman)
Subject: Re: English part of speech question
Message-ID: <DKDE4C.HnI@world.std.com>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
References: <30E35F22.D6F@mind.net>
Date: Fri, 29 Dec 1995 22:50:36 GMT
Lines: 23

Bruce Robertson <brucer@mind.net> writes:

>In the sentence, "To fish is to relax," what part(s) of speech
>are the "to"'s?

Confining myself to modern English, I would say it is a particle that
marks the infinitive; except for the accident of orthography it might
even be called a prefix.

Making a guess at the history, I would say that probably "to" was once
just the preposition, taking the bare infinitive as its object, and it
originally meant "in order to" (the metaphor being "in the direction
of" -> "with the purpose of").  We still use the "to" infinitive that
way ("I come to bury Caesar"), and it would take only a little
sloppiness to genereralize the form to the other uses of the
infinitive.

Probably Hebrew infinitives begin with "le" (= "to") for the same
reason.
-- 
        Joe Fineman             jcf@world.std.com
        239 Clinton Road        (617) 731-9190
        Brookline, MA 02146
