User talk:Wikitiki89/en-conj-table

Subjunctive

It's probably better to make the layout more like that of {{ang-conj-table}}, with a separate row but no distinction in person. English does have a past subjunctive after all: if I were you.... —CodeCat 19:33, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

There is distinction in person with the archaic thou and 3sg forms. --WikiTiki89 22:27, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

And I always thought that "if I were you" is the conditional. Either way, it only applies to be, which is irregular enough anyway. --WikiTiki89 22:28, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

The conditional is the same as the past subjunctive, it was used in both roles. It's found in Dutch, although the Dutch subjunctive is generally replaced by the indicative. And German has the "Konjunktiv II" which is diachronically the past subjunctive. This suggests that the conditional usage was known in Gothic as well. So it seems that within the Germanic languages, the past subjunctive is always understood to include conditional statements.

Old English didn't originally have a distinction in person in the subjunctive. There was only a distinction between singular and plural, like formerly in Dutch. If this changed sometime during the history of English, I wonder when? And if the archaic 3sg form changed from be to something else, why did it not affect the modern form? —CodeCat 22:46, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

I don't know how forms such as doest and doeth came to be the subjunctives of dost and doth (and in fact I'm not quite sure whether they were exclusively subjunctive or just alternative forms), but somehow they appeared. I always thought they were related to the German subjunctive (tust vs tuest). And they were lost along with their indicative counterparts, which is why "it did not affect the modern form". --WikiTiki89 22:54, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

The etymologically original form of the 3sg present subjunctive was just do, as seen in dōn. The later addition of -est and -eth is analogical, and likewise for the German forms. In "modern" English, do is still the normal 3sg form, and stands out because of its lack of -s like in the indicative, which is certainly an archaism. But what is strange is that the ending -eth was added analogically, but the -s ending was not similarly added. That is, why do we have the subjunctive doeth with analogical ending, but not does? —CodeCat 23:15, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

It may be just me making false assumptions. I am not 100% sure that doeth is actually a subjunctive, which is backed up by the fact that I find no results for "that he beeth" in Google Books (even though there are plenty of results for both "that he doeth" and "that he doth"; also note that I did these searches limiting the date to no later than 1850). The thou subjunctive definitely exists as a subjunctive however, as evidenced by "that thou beest". --WikiTiki89 23:24, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

Maybe this should be discussed more widely at the TR then? —CodeCat 23:42, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

Maybe. --WikiTiki89 00:23, 29 March 2014 (UTC)