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+--- Thread: Subjunctive Mood (/showthread.php?tid=39282)
Subjunctive Mood - Kalovale - 2011-03-14
Halp. I learned this stuff so long ago that the actual material rusted away completely. And the prolonged exposure to the internet use of language has rubbed off on me one way or another. So, I am really unsure about this.
According to good old Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood#The_subjunctive_in_English
Three subjunctives include: the present, the past and the future. Fair enough.
Present: It is not advisable that you be a peach to everyone.
Past: If I were you, I would tap that ass.
Future: Were I to win the lottery, I would surely pass out from the surprise.
I'm very skeptical about the correct formation for past and future subjunctives. I have been seeing, even here on Southperry, "if I was" for such a long time that I'm not even sure anymore.
I don't think I ever learned how to use the future subjunctive, so I think I butchered it, someone fix please.
Halp?
Subjunctive Mood - Fiel - 2011-03-14
That's because sometimes, especially in American English (as commoners speak it), we just use the past tense instead of the future subjunctive mood.
Future: Were I to win the lottery, I would surely pass out from the surprise.
Future: If I won the lottery, I'd probably pass out from surprise.
"Were I to win" sounds uppity and too proper. A different way to word it would be:
Future: If I were to win the lottery...
Also, this sentence:
Past: If I were you, I would tap that ass.
It's not really past tense, I don't feel like. Because it's like saying, "If I were you right now, I would tap that ass." So it feels like present tense. Even the first example is weird.
Past: "If I would have won the lottery, I would be much better off." <-- any american would understand that as past tense
So yeah, people who speak English generally don't use the subjunctive - definitely not as much as other languages do.
Subjunctive Mood - Kalovale - 2011-03-14
Fiel Wrote:Also, this sentence:
Past: If I were you, I would tap that ass.
It's not really past tense, I don't feel like. Because it's like saying, "If I were you right now, I would tap that ass." So it feels like present tense. Even the first example is weird.
No it is NOT past tense, as this is not about tenses. The past form of the subjunctive indicates the impossibility, non-happening of the event, basically the same as the second conditional "if" statement: an unreal situation (though technically speaking, the second conditional uses subjunctive mood for its verb, not the other way around).
The first sentence should be correct, that's as much as my confidence goes.
I find it rather irrelevant that the English language names them with names of the tenses when their usage has very little to do with the actual tense they are in.
Subjunctive Mood - Mute - 2011-03-14
Or "If I were you I would've tapped that ass." for the past tense.
Subjunctive Mood - Kalovale - 2011-03-14
Mute Wrote:Or "If I were you I would've tapped that ass." for the past tense.
That would be "If I had been you (at that time), I would have tapped that ass (at that time)."
This is both in the present.
Subjunctive Mood - Fiel - 2011-03-14
I don't doubt that the first sentence is correct. It is. It just sounds weird.
Subjunctive Mood - Kalovale - 2011-03-14
I guess this has refreshed my memory enough to be confident when I use "Were" to go with "I".
I still have no idea how I should use Future subjunctive intuitively. Does it imply an unlikely-to-happen event in the future?
Were I to become a millionaire, [what's next?]
Subjunctive Mood - Fiel - 2011-03-14
Kalovale Wrote:Were I to become a millionaire, I would cure the world of hunger