The subjunctive in the Romance languages

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Fraggle Rocker

Staff member
This subject sprang up in the "Hardest Language to Learn" thread, so I thought I'd spin it off.

The imperfect subjunctive is the form that we have only a vestige of in English, in phrases like "If I were king..." The Romance languages have a much richer subjunctive mode, with both a present and imperfect (past) tense. In the original Latin it was even richer, with present, imperfect and pluperfect (past perfect) tenses.

Spanish has two different ways to conjugate verbs in the imperfect subjunctive: the -ara series and the -ase series. They're identical in meaning; the choice is a matter of personal or regional preference. I never hear Mexicans use the -ase form and I would stumble if I tried to use it myself. However, after the question was raised in the other thread, I researched the subject and discovered that the other Romance languages (with one exception) have only one form for the imperfect subjunctive and it's the -ase or -asse series. That includes Portuguese, Catalan, French and Italian. (More on Romanian in a minute, and I couldn't find Occitan or Romansh.)

It turns out that in Latin the -asse series was the pluperfect subjunctive. All of its descendant languages co-opted that for the imperfect subjunctive and lost the pluperfect tense. (I mean really, who cares about the subtle difference between "If I were king" and "If I had been king"?) The Latin imperfect subjunctive ended in -are and that's presumably where Spanish got the -ara series, retaining the original Latin in parallel with the co-opted pluperfect-serving-as-imperfect form.

The only Romance language this doesn't apply to is Romanian. I haven't been able to find the Romanian verb paradigms anywhere except for the present indicative, but I did encounter a comment that Romanian doesn't form the imperfect subjunctive the way all the other Romance languages do. That figures; even its present indicative forms are weird. "I speak Romanian" is eu vorbesc români.
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
Spanish has two different ways to conjugate verbs in the imperfect subjunctive: the -ara series and the -ase series. They're identical in meaning; the choice is a matter of personal or regional preference. [/i]
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And then there is the frequent confusion (prevalent in some Northern regions, mostly the Basque Country and Navarra) between the subjunctive and the conditional, as in:

"Si lo habría sabido antes, no hubiera/ese ido" instead of the correct "si lo hubiera/ese sabido antes, no habría ido" ("If I had known beforehand, I wouldn't have gone").

I bring you this fascinating tidbit of information because I know you love these things.http://www.sciforums.com/images/smilies/smile.gif
 
fadeaway humper said:
And then there is the frequent confusion (prevalent in some Northern regions, mostly the Basque Country and Navarra) between the subjunctive and the conditional, as in:

"Si lo habría sabido antes, no hubiera/ese ido" instead of the correct "si lo hubiera/ese sabido antes, no habría ido" ("If I had known beforehand, I wouldn't have gone").
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The subjunctive is abused in Mexico also. They'll put both verbs in the imperfect subjunctive with neither in the conditional.
 
I suspect that most English-only speakers don't even know what the 'subjunctive' is and that this is going over their heads.

I was taught to say in English, for example "If I were smarter, I would have done that differently." But in common usage, most people say "If I was smarter, I would have done that differently." Everyone understands both to mean the same.

The subjunctive in English has effectively been completely eliminated [except for those of us who still use the relic 'were', being the German subjunctive cognate 'waere'].

Consequently, when I first began studying Latin and its subjunctive mood, I was initially at a loss for the necessity of the verb structure. However, the richness of that verb form in the Indo-European languages is compelling as to how important it is to many speakers.

Have we lost something in English by eliminating the subjunctive?
 
Walter L. Wagner said:
Have we lost something in English by eliminating the subjunctive?
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No more than we've lost by eliminating the dative and accusative cases of nouns.

We still have the grammatical constructions: If it be my fate... Had I been there... Were it not for the missing chapter... Be that as it may. The word order clarifies the meaning.

Inflected languages allow for more creative word order. As they lose their inflections their syntax becomes more rigid because the sequence has to carry some of the meaning of the sentence. English word order is more rigid than Spanish, in which you can reverse subject and verb, because the conjugational endings make it impossible to confuse a noun with a verb. And both English and Spanish are much more rigid than Latin, in which you can put the object first, because the accusative case ending easily distinguishes it from the subject, which is in the nominative case.

Chinese word order is even more rigid because it has no inflections at all. In general there is only one way to put your words together in a sentence without changing the meaning. They even get by without prepositions. "I went TO school ON the bus AFTER breakfast" becomes "I eat breakfast ride bus attend school." Verbs express some of the relationships and word order covers the sequence of events.
 
Fracking AMAZING research Fraggle!

Thank you so much for the answer! I'm really stunned that you were able to come across this explanation and it fits perfectly.

Fraggle Rocker said:
(I mean really, who cares about the subtle difference between "If I were king" and "If I had been king"?)
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So, there was a conjugated form that encompassed "had been" all in one word. Because to say either in Spanish would use a different phrase:

"If I were king of Spain..." : "Si yo fuera [or fuese] el rey de España..."
and
"If I had been king of Spain..." : "Si yo hubiera [or hubiese] sido el rey de España..." ("haber" : "to have")

Is this to say that in Latin there was a past perfect tense that functions without the Latin equivalent of the helping verb "to have"?

A side note: I talked with my friend in Tenerife, and he said that (just as in Mexico as you pointed out) the "era" is more common than the "ese" conjugation, though in parts of Spain the "ese" is more dominant.

Fraggle Rocker said:
That figures; even its present indicative forms are weird. "I speak Romanian" is eu vorbesc români.
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I don't follow. The order & conjugation seems logical. What am I missing?

Fraggle Rocker said:
They even get by without prepositions. "I went TO school ON the bus AFTER breakfast" becomes "I eat breakfast ride bus attend school." Verbs express some of the relationships and word order covers the sequence of events.
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So there are no prepositions, AT ALL in Chinese? Is it in err to assume that Chinese were caught in the grip of history before it could evolve them? Is the "direction" of the verb always conveyed by the order of the phrase? What about other un-related languages--say Semitic or Dravidian in nature--do they get by without them as well?

~String
 
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superstring01 said:
Is this to say that in Latin there was a past perfect tense that functions without the Latin equivalent of the helping verb "to have"?
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Indeed. That's the pluperfect. The pluperfect subjunctive is the -asse series of endings which has been coopted for the imperfect subjunctive in most of the Romance languages. Of course there's also a pluperfect indicative: amaveram, audiveram.
Eu vorbesc româneste

I don't follow. The order & conjugation seems logical. What am I missing?
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My point is that the Latin first person singular present indicative ends in -o. It's one of the most consistent, regular inflections in the entire language, and has been passed down to all the other Romance languages, in many cases without any phonetic alteration. Where did the Romanians get -esc?
So there are no prepositions, AT ALL in Chinese?
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There is no separate part of speech. However, there are many verbs and nouns and combinations thereof that express the relationships which we have to express with our handful of Stone Age prepositions. "I am in the dining room" is wo zai fan-ting li, "I occupy [the] food-room['s] interior."
Is the "direction" of the verb always conveyed by the order of the phrase?
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No, not always. "I am walking towards the car" = wo dao che zou-lu = "I approach[-ing] car walk." I am walking away from the car" = wo cong che zou-lu = I reced[ing-from] car walk."

Anglophone teachers generally call words like li, dao, cong prepositions because they are used to translate English prepositions. But if you study Chinese syntax analytically, these words function as nouns and verbs. They similarly call hong, gao, re, kuai adjectives, because they translate "red, tall, hot, fast." But they all function as verbs and their literal meanings are "to be red, to be tall, to be hot, to be fast."

Anglophones still apparently haven't gotten over our bad old tendency to analyze one language according to the structure of another more exalted one; they've merely changed the reference standard from Latin to English. English textbooks used to teach the declension of nouns according to the Latin model even though there are no inflected endings except in the possessive singular. BTW that's where the rule about not splitting an infinitive comes from. In Latin it's impossible because it's all one word.
What about other un-related languages--say Semitic or Dravidian in nature--do they get by without them as well?
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Hebrew has prepositions. That's the only Semitic language I know anything about. Of course that could just be English scholars forcing Hebrew into the paradigm of Latin.:)

I know people who speak Dravidian languages but they've never studied them analytically so they have a hard time applying the concepts of grammar to them. They are all taught English, Hindi and (in higher education) Sanskrit analytically, but not always their own regional languages.
-ND- said:
Sorry man I'm going to have to correct you. I am Romanian by the way. It is "Eu vorbesc româneste."
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Thanks for the correction. Româna is what someone taught me incorrectly.
 
Np. He is right in a way, Româna is the language in general. When you out I/eu it changes.
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
Oh I see. I think what they told me was vorbiƫe româna, the second-person form.
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Hmm. Vorbiƫi româna/româneste. To be honest with you I think româneste is the proper way. I guess româna is not wrong, it just sounds weird to me lol. For example: Limba româna/The romanian language. This is also a proper way for using româna.

I left Romania when I was 12 so I didn't really get a chance to get into it, unfortunately. Grammar/structure that is.
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
Where did the Romanians get -esc?There is no separate part of speech.
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If I were to guess, I'd say it was brought about by the influence of some non-Romance invading tribe like the Magyars or the Slavs. I could be wrong. Maybe just one of those weird untraceable linguistic anomalies like the ridiculous Castilian penchant for pronouncing the "z" and soft "c" as a raspy "th" sound. (Nowhere else in hispanophonic world do you find this, though I once heard a urban legend that it came about because of a king with a notably strong lisp, which lisp, made him overwhelmingly insecure. Since the king can never be allowed to feel inferior, the entire court was ordered to adopt the sound. As with all royalist nations, trends started at the top and trickled down. The veracity of this story is in doubt, but it sure is pretty.)

Any chance you'll be able to track down the truth to either of our thoughts? I'd be interested in hearing your findings.

~String
 
superstring01 said:
If I were to guess, I'd say it was brought about by the influence of some non-Romance invading tribe like the Magyars or the Slavs.
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The Magyars were recent invaders. We still call their country Hungary because the Huns got there first, even though they call it Magyarorszag.

When I first studied this the conventional wisdom was that when the Romans conquered Wallachia, Transylvania and Moldavia, the people who lived there spoke a Slavic language, a substratum which influenced their Latin. This would make Romanian similar to French; the Franks were a conquered people who adopted the language of their conquerors but retained many of the characteristics of their Germanic language, notably umlauted vowels, the gargled R, and a preference for the present perfect tense over the preterit.

Today's technology makes archeology more precise and allows us the creepy joy of analyzing the DNA found in graves. Apparently the Romanians are descended primarily from the Roman occupiers rather than the people they displaced (much like the Iberians), and Latin was their ancestral language. The Slavic tribes began migrating into that part of Europe after Romania was settled by Romans, and during the collapse of the Empire their language became a superstratum, similar to the influence of Norman French on Anglo-Saxon. Thus Romanian has the Slavic preposition do for "to," the Slavic numerical construction "eight over ten" instead of "ten and eight," and its speakers were not motivated to level the Latin noun declensions which are simpler than those of Russian or Czech.

However, that still doesn't explain -esc as the first person singular verb inflection. In the Slavic languages the ending is either -m or a vowel with no consonant at all. -Esc- is a common enough morpheme in French, but I'm not sure it isn't from the bread-and-butter Germanic adjectival suffix -isk ("-ish" in EnglISH) and therefore not Latin at all.
Maybe just one of those weird untraceable linguistic anomalies like the ridiculous Castilian penchant for pronouncing the "z" and soft "c" as a raspy "th" sound. (Nowhere else in hispanophonic world do you find this, though I once heard a urban legend that it came about because of a king with a notably strong lisp, which lisp, made him overwhelmingly insecure. Since the king can never be allowed to feel inferior, the entire court was ordered to adopt the sound. As with all royalist nations, trends started at the top and trickled down. The veracity of this story is in doubt, but it sure is pretty.)
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The Wikipedia article on ceceo, as it's known, debunks this hypothesis because the dates are all wrong. Not to mention the lack of explanation for why he only lisped his Z and soft C but not his S. Some urban legends yield to simple common sense.;)

The evolution of Spanish over the centuries is pretty well documented and it appears that the TH sound is the remnant of a simplification of a once-impressive array of sibilants that have now been reduced to just three (S, CH and TH) in Castilian and two in Latin American.
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
Apparently the Romanians are descended primarily from the Roman occupiers rather than the people they displaced (much like the Iberians), and Latin was their ancestral language.
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This makes sense. IIRC, the land that is now Romania was spoil that was promised to Roman legions as a reward for their service.

Fraggle Rocker said:
However, that still doesn't explain -esc as the first person singular verb inflection. In the Slavic languages the ending is either -m or a vowel with no consonant at all. -Esc- is a common enough morpheme in French, but I'm not sure it isn't from the bread-and-butter Germanic adjectival suffix -isk ("-ish" in EnglISH) and therefore not Latin at all.
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So no clues at all? Odd. Normally these things can be traced with some accuracy because of the surviving documents of the era. Latin, for the most part, never changes and the slow progression of the home language can be seen in context to the translations of the time.

Fraggle Rocker said:
Some urban legends yield to simple common sense.;)
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Indeed. The Spanish are known for their unwieldy stories. Remind me one day and I'll tell you about my host mother's penchant for telling me tales about witches, gnomes and magical crystals. And she wasn't at total oddball.

Fraggle Rocker said:
The evolution of Spanish over the centuries is pretty well documented and it appears that the TH sound is the remnant of a simplification of a once-impressive array of sibilants that have now been reduced to just three (S, CH and TH) in Castilian and two in Latin American.
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Thanks for the info.

~String
 
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