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Subjunctive "If I were you" | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5319 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 33 of 39 21 September 2012 at 8:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Ah, thank you, that's a lovely poem, and I hadn't seen it before.
To be fair, the dialog in this poem isn't in the New England vernacular, aside from a few turns of phrase. New Englanders certainly spoke like that, and even New England farmers, but that's a very formal speech register. Here an example of an actual New England vernacular. Tim Sample's performing for laughs, and his "a" would be considered pretty grating in many parts of Maine, but he's a lot closer to the old vernacular: * Tim Sample (Maine) Pay special attention to the grammar, which shows a huge number of New England speech features that don't appear in the Frost poem. I have a Vermont example from Fred Tuttle as well, which is probably closer to the dialect Frost is imitating. (Tuttle was a dairy farmer about one generation younger than Frost who achieved some local fame in his old age.) But it's not available anywhere online. But the speech of rural characters in literature isn't the point I'm trying to make here. Robert Frost used "If I was…" when writing in his own voice. For example, from a letter he wrote to "Miss Ward":
As Ari's graph demonstrates, this is an enormously common usage. You can find it everywhere, even in the works of excellent writers. And for me, that's the only grammatical standard that matters: Do careful, well-respected writers use a specific turn of phrase when writing in their own voice? Have they done so for generations? If so, then the opinions of ESL textbooks or high school English teachers are pretty much irrelevant in my view. Edited by emk on 21 September 2012 at 8:45pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| nonneb Pentaglot Groupie SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4538 days ago 80 posts - 173 votes Speaks: English*, Ancient Greek, Latin, German, Spanish Studies: Mandarin, Hungarian, French | Message 34 of 39 21 September 2012 at 9:02pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I use "were" as is being described in this thread. It wasn't something I learned later at school, and it sounds wrong
when I hear things like "If I was you." It drives me nuts because as far as I can tell (and Murphy's grammar book notes agreed), the use of the subjunctive (irrealis, whatever your preferred name) is no longer the most common usage in Britain. I love to use Harry Potter for LR, but the English versions never use the "were" subjunctive. *shudder* Also, someone earlier in the thread said that "be" is the only verb with an irrealis form. This is partially true. More accurately, I would say that it is the only verb with a distinct irrealis form. "If I had money" is subjunctive as well, but the form of the subjunctive doesn't differ from the past tense. Edit: I forgot to mention on the topic of "I recommend he be here" vs. "I wish I were there." The first I generally here called the present subjunctive and the second past subjunctive in the ESL context, but that is probably arbitrary. Edited by nonneb on 21 September 2012 at 9:07pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 6931 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 35 of 39 22 September 2012 at 4:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Many thanks to Ari for introducing a historical perspective to this debate. In hindsight, I think it's clear to see that if proper steps had been taken at the time, and if a few of the early instigators had been strung up publicly, we wouldn't be confronting the crisis we have today... Edited by daristani on 22 September 2012 at 4:50pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5013 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 36 of 39 29 September 2012 at 2:33pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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A funny thread.
I thought I knew what hair splitting was until I heard the whole irrealis vs subjunctive mood thing :) It's also amusing how prescriptivism is generally considered bad by English speakers but appealing to authority is apparently OK. That would kind of imply that authors do not make mistakes, wouldn't it? As I said, funny... Oh, @RReview congratulations on being quite the marksman when it comes to thinking of examples of, well, everything! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6369 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 37 of 39 29 September 2012 at 6:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Whu? In my experience most English-speakers are die-hard prescriptivists. Well, the ones who care, anyway. Linguists are almost by necessity descriptivists, but your average Joe will often have very strong feelings about splitting infinitives and avoiding the passive voice (although he has no idea what that actually means, but he knows it when he sees it). I've always had the feeling that the reason why English doesn't have an Academy like Spanish or French is not that they understand it's a silly and pointless thing to have, but rather that anytime someone tries to found one it quickly implodes as its members start to kill each other off over the lay/lie distinction and whether "metrosexual" is a britishism or an americanism. Regarding appeals to authority, I think that when made by descriptivists it's usually as a way to try to reach the prescriptivists through their reality distortion field. Since prescriptivism is based on the theory that civilization will collapse if certain grammatical features disappear from the language and that not observing said distinctions makes you not only a bad person but a bad writer, one way to counter that argument might be to point out that for example the use of "they" as a singular pronoun was used by Shakespeare, Austen and Wilde. This leaves the prescriptivist with the options of either renouncing his claim that "they" as a singular pronoun makes one a bad writer or declaring Shakespeare to be one, along with a huge number of other authors of note throughout English language history. Of course, this never works, but we keep on trying. If we can save one soul from dying in a heart attack brought on by seeing an omitted subjunctive, our efforts have not been in vain. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 6931 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 38 of 39 29 September 2012 at 7:29pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I don't think we have too much to worry about in terms of major loss of life; the "descriptivists", despite the vehemence of their iconoclasm, generally take care to write, and usually speak, in such a way as to satisfy most of the "prescriptivists'" most acute concerns, and also teach the same forms to their children. So like most academic squabbles, it revolves a lot more about theory than anything in real life... Edited by daristani on 29 September 2012 at 7:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4455 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 39 of 39 29 September 2012 at 11:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Prescriptivists say ''Austin, Shakespeaere etc'' can use ''if I was you'' because of
the ''artistic license'', but other mortals cannot. All in all, UK and US English are diverging in many ways... I've seen Americans correcting Britons who wrote ''if I was you'' and ''I recommend you to try the cake'' on some forums. UK English is not a sub-variant of US English. There are many constructions which are grammatical in UK English, but agrammatical in US English, and vice versa. No variant is more correct, or more incorrect. They're just different. Google search: "if I were you" site:uk About 567,000 results "if I was you" site:uk About 2,370,000 results "if I were you" site:ie About 527,000 results "if I was you" site:ie About 494,000 results "if I were you" site:ca About 63,700 results "if I was you" site:ca About 5,260,000 results Edited by Medulin on 29 September 2012 at 11:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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