古崇賢的学报

My friend Hurshy said:

happy feels warm and quiet. merry feels laughy and enjoying wholesome pleasures. gay feels sort of like merry but with an added nuance of possible recklessness.

i think more than a few of you will enjoy Jabberwockke.

Today, i'm following up on this post, in which i asked yall about the future subjunctive.

maddogairpirate presented in that thread his take on the future subjunctive, and i agree with his usage, but he's from Connecticut, which is in a region where the English subjunctive is all but dead, about which more in another post. Maddog does have fluency in Spanish, which helps inform his view in ways that most of you lack.

doctor_tectonic in that thread pointed me at the Wikipedia Article on the Subjunctive Mood, section on English, subsection on the Future Subjunctive. All the examples in it start with If ... followed by a ...were to... or a ...should.... In English, yes, that's how it's done.

That construction however, does not reflect usage in Spanish. Most always, we need more words in English to express a Spanish verb, as their verbs conjugate fully, and ours don't. The future subjunctive is rather rare in Spanish, and marginally more common in English. We use our present progressive and future tenses more than Spanish does. The way verbs work in each language, English has a better expressivity in the future, whereas Spanish has a better expressivity in the past.

So, back to the matter at hand: hubiese and hubiesen, the future subjunctive forms of there is and there are respectively. Spanish does not require an if nor a should nor a whether with those verbs, as the verb includes that, though an if may proceed them. Which form the English should take is highly contextual based on the Spanish.

Here's the spreadsheet of Spanish-English verb equivalencies i've made for my student. Feed back welcome, not least because i'm still at a loss on the future subjunctive of haber, which will require a bit of explanation.

Spanish has two verbs for have: haber and tener. Haber is the helping verb have, and the irregular 3rd person sigular of the present indicitave and the regular 3rd-person singular preterite indicatives have the meaning of there is/are, as do the 3rd person singular and plural in most non-present-indicative conjugations. Tener is have, as in have in posession, and is not giving me the same trouble in translation.

Following up on this post, i have a poll on use of the subjunctive in Modern English. I've read all your comments on the last post, and am using them to compose the follow-up, and i belive, culminating post on this topic.

Oh, and i'd like to point out that not all of the following are valid, and some are only valid in limited contexts in some dialects, insofar as i am aware.

[Poll #1001250]

I (he) asked him (me) to do it, but he (I) would not.

The above sentence, from this article, cannot be rendered into Spanish in that structure, nor most any language with fully conjugated verbs, very easily, if at all.