What is meant by 'the subjunctive' in English ? One of my Latin tutors was fond of saying that the true subjunctive does not exist in English. I dare say he was being technical or pedantic about that language but I note that the claim that the subjunctive is dying out in English has been made here . So what is it or was it (with examples, please)?

What an odd question for an erudite gentleman such as you to ask this early on a Saturday morning, Fred! (07:04 UK time, for those in different time zones)

I'm sure Maiku can give a much more detailed and precise answer, but I consider that the subjunctive does still exist in English, though it is in decline.

Its use is principally for conditional clauses which cannot or may not apply. An example is "If I were you". I'm not and never can be. Previous generations might have said things like "Though it be hard, yet will I persevere", which today we would render as "It may (or will) be hard, but I will ...".

I submit that the decline is at least partly because the subjunctive word is often the same as the direct tense, e.g. "If you were any good, you would ...". In this case, were is actually subjunctive, but you were is also correct in direct past tense.

Does this help, or should I advise you to get a life?

'Get a life' Ewood ? . I was mindful that 'Ars longa vita brevis ' so I thought I'd take a bit of someone else's life to find out what the old boy back in 1961 was on about !

What your pedantic Latin tutor very probably had in mind is that there is no separately inflected verb form in English to express the subjunctive.

Like all Germanic languages, English really has only two independent tenses, the present and the past. There is no future tense in English, no perfect tense, and no progressive tense, either, in the sense that these aspects of the verb are marked by separate verb inflections. Instead, they are expressed periphrastically, by means of certain verb auxilliaries, which again themselves occur only in the present or past tense, viz. will/would, is/was (or are/were), and has/had.

In the cases Ewood has described above, what happens is that the subjunctive is expressed by choosing a plural form of the verb in place of a singular one. Thus, this use of the "subjunctive" doesn't have its own verb inflection either. Moreover, it is distinctive only in the case of a first or third person singular subject.

There is at least one other common use of the subjunctive in English today besides the one Ewood has already described so accurately. In a that-clause appearing as complement of a class of verbs including demand, request, suggest, and so on, the subjunctive mood is expressed in English with a wholly uninflected (the infinitive) form of the verb, e.g., in sentences like "I demand that he be set free at once" or "I suggest that Tom go to blazes."

[This message was edited by maiku on 04-26-03 at 09:23 AM.]

I remember a few years back at the time of the war between Britain and Argentina when use of the subjuctive was really vital.
In the third person singular, the only differentiation between indicative and subjunctive mood lies only in the omission of the final 's' from the verb form 'as stated in the other responses here).
Anyway, the sentence quoted by a famed diplomat was:
"The important thing for this country is that Argentina recognise Britain's sovereignty over the Falkland Islands."
Has he written:
"The important thing for this country is that Argentina recognises Britain's sovereignty over the Falkland Islands."
there would have been no war, since the desired aim would have already been a fait accompli.

Welcome, Colin. I see that that was your first post.It's pretty neat to get two subjects viz 'history' and 'words and language' into the same reply and have both relevant.I did try to do that once deliberately , simply as an amusing conceit. It was a complete waste of time.Nobody was ever going to notice because here the 'thread' often runs so completely off the original subject that the result is like a game of Mornington Crescent or Chinese whispers ! It's good fun though !

I see. So what, if it exists, is the conditional form of the verb in English ? French verbs have one present and two past tenses of it and have a subjunctive form too, in present, imperfect, perfect and pluperfect tenses! Grammarians have long tried to identify and classify parts of our language to put it into some order. They have patently taken Latin grammar as their model.This probably works better with Romance languages. Let us take the use of the subjunctive mood in the main clause. In Latin we have the hortatory 'Let us kill them', 'Let them cherish modesty'; the optative ''would that you....' ' may you be safe '; the concessive 'granted he is dishonest...'; the deliberative 'what to do?'' I should like you to think' and so on, all using the one, subjunctive form of the verb. Which, if any are subjunctive in the English ? Our subjunctive main clauses seem to be restricted to fixed phrases 'So be it!, 'Be that as it may' and fixed frames 'Long live...!' 'Far be it from me to...'. (When we turn to subordinate clauses and how certain words 'take' the subjunctive in Latin we are in a different world). Interestingly 'if' in Latin takes the indicative in conditions which are assumed to be true or probably soon becoming true but the subjunctive where they are just possible or simply unreal ! (This follows Ewood's statement about English conditional clauses). ' I were you' though is 'If I was you' (indicative, imperfect) in French, oddly. Just to add to the fun, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language will not have 'were' there as a true subjunctive. For them it is an 'irrealis'as they term it,and they also distinguish 'If that be so, the plan will have to be revised' ( subjunctive use of plain form) from 'If that were so, the plan would have to be revised' ('irrealis'). As to dying out, I suspect it is simply that we prefer to use other forms of words than the subjunctive ( however defined) nowadays.

Your original question, Fred, asked what your pedantic Latin tutor was on about in claiming that English doesn't have (at least not any longer), any subjunctive.

I offered the explanation above that English does not in fact have a set of verb inflections like those in Latin and the Romance languages descended from it which are distinctive of any "subjunctive" mood, and in this sense I believe your Latin tutor was entirely correct.

English does, of course, have various means of saying the very same kinds of things that Cicero may have expressed by use of subjunctive verb forms. To wit: the hortatory: Let him be set free at once. The optative: Would that I were you. Concessive: But just supposing he were a thief, what would you have done? (The use of verb forms that distinguish this latter kind of case from the indicative is indeed rapidly dying out.)

To repeat, English does not have a distinctive set of subjunctive (or conditional) verb forms. But it loses absolutely nothing in that. It also has no distinction, inflectionally, between the imperfect past and the definite past, as in modern French. Do we miss it? Not a wit.

By the way: the term irrealis you use above is not one I'm familiar with, but it seems clear to me that it means the same thing as "counterfactual." Counterfactual conditionals make up, of course, the main set of cases in which verb forms in English are marked as distinct from the indicative (but defectively so), as Ewood and I have both already pointed out.

[This message was edited by maiku on 04-28-03 at 07:16 PM.]