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Bring Back the Subjunctive! | ||
Tags: Morphology | English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5220 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu | Message 9 of 29 09 March 2012 at 1:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've developed a complete suite of registers for my own language since I came here! Since secondary school I've had a big English vocabulary and that is leaking into my L2's now.
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| tritone Senior Member United States reflectionsinpo Joined 6121 days ago 246 posts - 385 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, French | Message 10 of 29 19 March 2012 at 3:49am | IP Logged | |||||
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A big misconception is that we don't already use the subjunctive. The use of the subjunctive in English is almost as common as it is in French, it's just that people don't know when they use it.
...and it's not as if we have a choice to use it or not. Many things in English would sound ugly/wrong if the indicative is used instead of the subjunctive. Edited by tritone on 19 March 2012 at 3:55am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| KimG Diglot Groupie Norway Joined 4978 days ago 88 posts - 104 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Portuguese, Swahili | Message 11 of 29 19 March 2012 at 3:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Any differences between the Brittish and American use of subjunctive? I can't even remember the word from English classes, but I definitively know what it is, and uses it. Could it be I can't remember it because it's not as much used in the Brittish formal curitculum, but are more used in dialects? Edited by KimG on 19 March 2012 at 3:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 12 of 29 19 March 2012 at 4:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
This link has some interesting notes on using the subjunctive including comments about differences in British and American treatment.
You may also find this comparison of using the subjunctive in American, British and Pakistani English to be relevant. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 meramarina Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5968 days ago 1341 posts - 2303 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Italian, French Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 29 19 March 2012 at 5:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
I have just read an interesting article on that topic (I think I've just read something about everything!). The author, Ta-Nehisi Coates, describes how beginning to study French has already changed his written expression: I've had this happen a few times over the past couple of months. It's not even just in vocabulary, but in sentence structure. And I have to believe that if I explored languages with more distance from English, I'd see even more interesting things and I would see, not simply highways, but entire flight-paths. Well-said, indeed! Here's a link: Young World (Not about subjunctive - I was going to post this on its own but it fits into this discussion, I hope!) Edited by meramarina on 19 March 2012 at 5:20pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4950 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 14 of 29 22 March 2012 at 6:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, I sort of had a reverse experience, which may be uncommon.
Before going into studying other Romance languages, I decided it would be better to become very well versed into how my native Romance language WORKS and is constructed. So I picked up a college level book and read it thoroughly, particularly the use of the tenses, which Spanish is notorious for its difficulty. I figured it would be MUCH easier to understand how the subjunctve, for example, works in a language I am completely confortable in before learning it in French or Portuguese. While I used the subjunctive in the proper contexts, I learned I was not using the proper tenses in the right situation. Reading this book helped enormously on that and in understanding why and when the subjunctive is used. When I hit the subjunctive in French and then Portuguese, it was mostly a breeze. So in an odd way, I learned of the future subjunctive in Spanish before learning it is still commonly used in Portuguese. And because I was fascinated with this tense, I learned how to use it in my written Spanish. At first I felt like a dork, but now I cannot write without using it in the correct circumstance. I'm sure everyone else still thinks I'm a dork, but I don't care. I'm right, they are wrong! El que quisiere expandir sus horizontes, mantendrá una mente abierta. So when I learned the Portuguese future subjunctive, there was no shock or struggle. I knew when and how to use it. I have also "revived" the Anterior preterite. This tense is only used by the "elites", or at least that is the impression. But now that I have an expanded temporal awareness, I simply cannot say: "Había desayunado y fuí al trabajo" ...when I meant to say "Hube desayunado y fuí al trabajo". Yes, there is a significant difference there, but most Spanish speakers have lost awareness of it, which is sad. I also use a very, very ABSTRUSE rule suggesting usage of the '-ara' tense subjunctive with an affirmative statement in an "if-clause", and the '-ese' tense subjunctive with a negative. This yields beautiful prose like: "Si lloviera no habría sol y si no lloviese habría sed". Compare to "Si lloviera no habría sol y si no lloviera habría sed". The first one is far more elegant and mellifluous. Edited by outcast on 22 March 2012 at 6:26pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Superking Diglot Groupie United States polyglutwastaken.blo Joined 6644 days ago 87 posts - 194 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Mandarin | Message 15 of 29 29 March 2012 at 3:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
My experience is limited to Latin American Spanish, but I've never heard "hube/hubiste/etc." used by anyone, no matter how ostensibly elite they were. Where have you heard it? Because I was taught by a Spanish-born instructor during my formative phase in Spanish that using the preterite with "haber" was almost always incorrect, and the imperfect was correct. "Había visto" instead of "hube visto," etc. The only exception is for referring to an event that occurred: "Hubo una fiesta," "hubo un terremoto," etc. My 10 years of experience with the language have borne that out. As far as the past subjunctive, I've always struggled to get a grasp on what exactly the use of the "-se" ending version is supposed to be, since it pops in about 1 time out of every 1,000 uses of the tense that I hear. But I would disagree about the elegance and mellifluity of the example above -- not to start an argument, but to highlight the subjectiveness of deciding that one version sounds better than another. Your opinion is just as valid as mine, i.e. completely valid, and just as scientifically rigorous as mine, i.e. not at all. I actually think the simplicity of having just the one form for both positive and negative is quite nice. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5131 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 16 of 29 29 March 2012 at 4:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'd be careful with this line of thinking, particularly as a non-native speaker.
Just curious, where did you get the impression that this is what "the elites" use? Again, as a non-native speaker, if you were to use this with a native speaker, you'd most likely get a wince or a raised eyebrow, then possibly a correction, whether they were an "elite" native speaker or not. R. == Edited by hrhenry on 29 March 2012 at 4:42pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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