Talk:nis

RFV discussion

This entry has survived Wiktionary's verification process.

Please do not re-nominate for verification without comprehensive reasons for doing so.

---

Never heard of it, and pretty hard to search for. Also what part of speech is this supposed to be? Nadando 22:04, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Though I've never heard of it, it seems to be a contraction. Seems to be the only contribution of User:Þadius. Mglovesfun (talk) 15:27, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Seems to be very obsolete. Certainly attestable in ME, possibly attestable in ModE (at least EModE). google books:"it nis" pulls up a fair number of relevant hits. (And when you find a full-view work that uses it, you can search within the work for "nis" alone, usually finding lots of uses.) It usually seems to be used with negative collocates ("it nis nat", "there nis non man", etc.), but since negative concord was typical of ME, that doesn't say very much. But I do find some uses without collocates that I recognize as negative, such as this one:

• http://books.google.com/books?id=SLULAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA259&dq=nis

  „Arthour,“ he seyd, „þi kinde it nis, / To stond o fot, for soþe ywis!“

  (?) "Arthur," he said, "your kind it isn't, / To stand on foot, forsooth I know!" (?)

  (?) "Arthur," he said, "I know it's not like you to stand on foot!"

where its meaning seems to be straightforwardly negative (though my ME is not good enough for me to say for sure.)

—Ruakh_TALK 17:00, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes, nis is a contraction of (deprecated template usage) ne and (deprecated template usage) is. Ne got bolted on to many common verbs; with "be", you had negative forms (I) "nam", (thou) "nart", and (he) "nis". They all died out during the 15th century. Ƿidsiþ 11:34, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Any objection to striking this as passed?​—msh210℠ (talk) 18:48, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

RFV passed.​—msh210℠ (talk) 20:30, 12 January 2011 (UTC)