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Subjunctive "If I were you" | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Gala Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4360 days ago 229 posts - 421 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 25 of 39 21 July 2012 at 3:05am | IP Logged | ||
It must be a UK/US difference, then. I'm definitely no expert on British English, but I still get the impression that even in the UK "If I was you" might be a bit lower in register than "It's me" or "Who did you see?", seeing as you wrote that you would never use the excessively proper-sounding alternatives to the latter 2, but do often say "If I were you." EDIT:I remember that episode of Family Guy, it slayed me. I almost referred to that song as evidence against Gwen's command of English. Edited by Gala on 21 July 2012 at 3:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Gala Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4360 days ago 229 posts - 421 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 26 of 39 20 September 2012 at 11:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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Part of an article on Gawker.com about homophobic remarks Paris Hilton recently made
led me to recall, and now resurrect, this thread: "Paris said:'.....I would be so scared if I was a gay guy. You'll like, die of AIDS.' This is an example of an idiot saying something idiotic (her disregard of the subjunctive mood is almost as offensive as her ideology)...." (italics added) Gawker is hardly a high-brow publication (which kind of goes without saying, as they feature an article about Hilton,) yet at least one of their writers considers the use of "If I was you..." (and in speech, not writing) to be worthy of censure. I think this is typical of how that usage is regarded by most even moderately well-spoken Americans. Edited by Gala on 21 September 2012 at 12:16am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6392 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 27 of 39 21 September 2012 at 8:27am | IP Logged | ||
Also, see this article on why "If I were" isn't even a subjunctive.
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 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5342 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 28 of 39 21 September 2012 at 3:05pm | IP Logged | ||
Highly-educated Americans use 'if I were you' and 'if I was you' interchangeably all the time, and have done so for generations. Only a tiny subset of people will ever notice or care, and that subset can be safely ignored. The key here may be "moderately well-spoken Americans". Being "moderately" well-spoken is perhaps like being nouveau riche—it comes with certain insecurities and status markers that old money would never worry about. As I mentioned upthread, a highly-respectable New England poet like Robert Frost was perfectly happy using "If I was…". So Gawker is trying to be more linguistically refined than Robert Frost, which is a bit ridiculous. It's like an investment banker lecturing the Rockefellers about how the rich should act, or the Rockefellers doing the same to the Boston Brahmins. Edited by emk on 21 September 2012 at 3:13pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6392 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 29 of 39 21 September 2012 at 3:53pm | IP Logged | ||
And here's proof of that, courtesy of Language Log and the power of graphs: 
Ok, so "I wish I were" and "if I were" are not the same thing, but they're grammatically equivalent with regards to this issue. EDIT: Note that this is a corpus search, so it's based on written English. Edited by Ari on 21 September 2012 at 3:54pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Gala Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4360 days ago 229 posts - 421 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 30 of 39 21 September 2012 at 7:00pm | IP Logged | ||
And as I previously mentioned, using examples from literature to prove what the norms of the standard written (or even spoken) forms of a language are is a problematic practice, as writers of fiction, poetry, and drama frequently employ non-standard forms in the interest of creating colorful or authentically regional "voice(s)". Robert Frost in particular certainly did: "Drawing his language primarily from the vernacular, he avoided artificial poetic diction by employing the accent of a soft-spoken New Englander. In The Function of Criticism, Yvor Winters faulted Frost for his "endeavor to make his style approximate as closely as possible the style of conversation." But what Frost achieved in his poetry was much more complex than a mere imitation of the New England farmer idiom. He wanted to restore to literature the "sentence sounds that underlie the words," the "vocal gesture" that enhances meaning. That is, he felt the poet's ear must be sensitive to the voice in order to capture with the written word the significance of sound in the spoken word. "The Death of the Hired Man," for instance, consists almost entirely of dialogue between Mary and Warren, her farmer-husband, but critics have observed that in this poem Frost takes the prosaic patterns of their speech and makes them lyrical. To Ezra Pound "The Death of the Hired Man" represented Frost at his best— when he "dared to write ... in the natural speech of New England; in natural spoken speech, which is very different from the 'natural' speech of the newspapers, and of many professors." Frost's use of New England dialect is only one aspect of his often discussed regionalism." http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-frost Edited by Gala on 21 September 2012 at 7:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Gala Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4360 days ago 229 posts - 421 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 31 of 39 21 September 2012 at 7:22pm | IP Logged | ||
They (and their "was" counterparts) may be grammatically equivalent in terms of their use and its "correctness" (or lack thereof,) but that isn't really the issue. The issue is whether or not "If I were (something I'm absolutely not and will never be)" as a set phrase is still much-preferred in standard written and spoken American English over "If I was (something I'm absolutely not and will never be)", even though the stigma of "incorrectness" has died away (at least in speech)for many other such grammatical distinctions (who/whom,etc.) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Gala Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4360 days ago 229 posts - 421 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 32 of 39 21 September 2012 at 7:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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As far as subjunctive vs."irrealis" goes, it could be that my background in Spanish
(where both of these are absolutely subjuntivo) makes me stubborn on this, but I refuse to adopt this rarefied distinction. The textbook for the Advanced English Grammar class I'm taking this semester categorizes "If I were" constructions as subjunctive mood. I don't see why the fact that there is no strictly subjunctive *form* that the verb takes would mean that it isn't in the subjunctive *mood.* BTW, the text (which does not take a firmly prescriptive stance) classifies usages such as "If Joe was here..." as "fairly common," but not standard for writing. My feeling is that phrases such as "If I were you" call for the subjunctive more strongly than those like "If Joe were here," because the latter is within the realm of possibility: Joe could very well be here at some point in the future. Clearly, however, no one is ever going to become the person they are addressing. The text doesn't mention "If I was you" as an alternative for "If I were you," which I think it would if it were approaching standard status. It mentions many usages that were previously considered incorrect that are now standard or close to it. Edited by Gala on 21 September 2012 at 7:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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