Boria wrote:http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/conditional.htmSome writers seem to think that the subjunctive mood is disappearing from English, but that's probably not true. We use the subjunctive all the time to accommodate this human urge to express possibility, the hypothetical, the imagined. (You can review the Verbs and Verbals section for further help understanding the Subjunctive Mood.) Frequently, conditional expressions require that we use were where we would otherwise have used another form of to be. The switch to were is not the only manifestation of the subjunctive in expressing the conditional, but it is the most common.vc wrote:Well, I disagree.
Well, there is a web site where I got the quote. You can discuss it with them I guess to see who is right. I just remember the subject from my school. That's all.
BTW, here is another site on subjunctive mood:
http://www.artefact.cns.ru/english/gram_subjunctive.htm
I think the important thing is to understand how these moods are constructed grammatically.
Oh, these pages are even better:
http://www.ceafinney.com/subjunctive/
http://www.ceafinney.com/subjunctive/examples.html
Please be a good sport and kindly answer the following:
1. Can you operate with _facts_ instead of just supplying links to some web sites?
2. Did you find an example of the Past Subjunctive I'd asked you about (any verb in addition to 'to be') ?
3. Your failing to locate such a beast, how the situation with the Past Subjunctive in English is different form the Vocative case in Russian as regards the phenomena morphological implementation and usage frequency ?
Rgds.