It was an invention of the Latinists, because they pretended that English had a grammar like Latin and the “to” was part of the verb. But it isn’t. It’s a construct designed to distinguish between the infinitive usage and the present tense, as otherwise you couldn’t distinguish them. The truth is really that English has dropped the infinitive in favour of the main form of the present tense, and it feels the need of a signifier even though it is not really necessary (for instance in Russian the conditional, where we would use an infinitive in English, is bi + the past tense. It’s just a convention.)
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