Now, this is something I’ve seen you say before (and other sources, too, at some point) and I’m really unclear what distinction is being made, or what its significance is. After all, there’s no set, common IE ending/formation for infinitives – they’re all basically just random verbal nouns, varying according to family; and your Old English forms like hieran and to hierenne for ‘to hear’ are usually referred to as infinitives… so, what gives?
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I mean that while some IE languages have distinctive and specific infinitive forms - like -ein in Attic Greek, or the Romance or Slavonic infinitive forms - English doesn’t. Put is just the base-form, and if you add a to, you simply get the base-form with a to in front of it! The grammar books these days call it the TO-FORM, in distinction to the ING-FORM.
I accept your point about Old English of course - the -an ending is distinctive - but what I said was that modern English never had such a thing. 
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[whistles innocently]
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[backs Homer-like into hedge again]
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Only our Gareth would name-drop Verbnouns 
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