"certain" inThe First Noel

[Laurence Urdang]

As we all recall, the line in The First Noel is,
  Was to certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay . . .

  It appears to be a special aberration of mine to parse certain as a verb, since it cannot, syntactically, be anything else.  Yet, I can find no other evidence or corroboration for it's occurrence as a verb.  Semantically, there is no problem: 'assure; make comfortably certain.'  Were it an adjective, it would need some sort of correlative: was WHAT to certain (special; specific) poor shepherds?
  Comment(s)?
  L. Urdang


"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject: "troll" in "Deck the Halls"
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On Aug 1, 2007, at 10:07 AM, Beverly Flanigan wrote:

> Wow. Maybe I was reinterpreting "troll" all those years--or maybe I'm
> misremembering now because I'd never actually analyzed the line.

now blogged on:

AZ, 8/1/07: Cousin of eggcorn:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004777.html

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