Into

I've just had a dyslexic work colleague asking me about "into", which he said spellcheckers sometimes insisted he wrote as two words. I said it's been one word for centuries; Googling reveals it arose from "in" + "to" in the late Old English period, to replace the fading dative case inflections (as the Online Etymological Dictionary put it), which formerly distinguished "in the house" from "into the house".

That's interesting. Modern German still makes that distinction: "im (in dem) Haus" in the dative, and "ins (in das) Haus" in the accusative, respectively. In Old English those would be "in þæm hūs" and "in þǣt hūse", apparently. (The shift from "-t" in English to "-s" in German must be part of the High German consonant shift; the shift from "þ" to "d" is because NONE OF THE GERMANIC PEOPLES APART FROM THE BRITISH AND THE ICELANDIC SEEM CAPABLE ANY MORE OF PRONOUNCING TH! *ahem*.)

I wonder if they were used the same way around as in German. After all, to me dative normally conveys a sense of to or for something, so the German use seems a bit the wrong way around, but maybe I'm just conflating historically distinct senses of "to". The only person I can think of that might be able to answer this is sion_a, and that's only because he used to have the first line of Winnie-the-Pooh in his .sig in Old English.