Talk:infeft

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The quotation by Carlyle clearly uses infeft as the past participle. Does this mean that it is a second form next to infefted? Is the verb strong? The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 16:15, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

• Well...is "infefted" actually used? (Hard to check -- most of the g.hits are scannos of "infested".) Normally the verb is enfeoff, which conjugates as expected. But infeft, which seems to be some kind of back-formation from the past form anyway, probably doesn't inflect much at all. Citations would clear this up.... Ƿidsiþ 16:23, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

  Does OED indorse infeft or infefted as past participle? Is the verb indeed obsolete given the quotation from 1843? Perhaps it is just dated? The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 16:59, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

  The OED only includes it as a 17th-century spelling variant of (deprecated template usage) enfeoff, and none of their citations even use this spelling, in the past or any other form. Ƿidsiþ 17:05, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

  Ok, but Carlyle does use it in the past, therefore one has no reason to dismiss infeft as a valid past participle. 17th-century spelling variant?! But the quotation is from the 19th century. I am aware that Carlyle was of Scottish origin, but the quotation still stems from the 19th century. So you are not favourable of a mitigation of the context tag (obsolete)? The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 17:30, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

  I'm not dismissing infeft as a past participle, on the contrary what I'm saying is that we need evidence that infefted was ever used instead. Ƿidsiþ 06:27, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

I'm not an expert on obsolete Scots, so I might be wrong, but I would have thought that, from the citation, enfeft and infeft are just the past participles of enfeoff (or infeoff) and not verbs in their own right. Dbfirs 12:50, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

That is also what I suspect. Ƿidsiþ 13:16, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

Restored the verb lemma: you can indeed find infefting etc. in Google Books. Equinox ◑ 16:02, 8 June 2019 (UTC)