How does the English subjunctive form work, and from where did it come?
Were I cleverer, I would tell you.
How does it work? I don’t know, but I can tell you what it’s for and how to use it (probably).
A good example of subjuctive use is:
‘If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.’
Here, ‘were’ is used as the subjunctive. This changes the meaning to ‘wishes aren’t horse, but if they were…’
English is one of the few languages that uses the subjunctive (case?) extensively. For example:
‘If he hadn’t been drinking, he wouldn’t have had an accident’
would, in Chinese, be:
‘He had an accident because he was drinking.’
Much more concise, but using the subjunctive allows to to mention stuff that has nothing to do with what really happened.
‘Had it been in a tropical rainforest beyond the imagination of even the greatest of the world’s minds, surrounded by the brightest and most bizarre of nature’s creations, it still would have been the object of curiosity and awe.’
But it wasn’t. But it’s a nice image, isn’t it?
Ironically, we learned most of our English grammar in French class. 
But here’s how it was explained to me:
An English sentence that avoids the subjunctive tense:
I asked her to answer my question.
The same idea in a sentence using the subjunctive tense:
I asked that she answer my question.
We don’t often recognise this tense because most English verb forms look the same. Romance languages use the subjunctive much more, although I know that in spoken French people tend to avoid it. In Spanish it’s quite common.
First off, it’s the subjunctive MOOD – not a tense or a voice.
Second, there are two of them – the first subjunctive and the second subjunctive. The first subjunctive is the one in JHW’s post. It is used to express the result of a command, order, wish, or desire, and sometimes to express some uncertainty. It takes the form of a naked infinitive: “The queen demanded that he be brought to his knees in her presence”; " The law requires that your headlights be aimed 15º from the horizontal"; “Be he alive or be he dead…”
The second subjunctive is the one in Sutremaine’s post. It is used to express a condition which is contrary to fact, and it takes the form of the thrid person plural past tense: “If I were you, I’d be running away now”; "If I were a woman, I’d… " um, skip that one. Both subjunctives can be used with any verb, but it’s indistinguishable from a regular past tense with most of them, which is why we always use “to be” to demonstrate it.
The subjunctive mood, as used in English, is derived from German, and corresponds roughly to their usage (so I am told – I don’t speak German).
This Chinese translation doesn’t ring true to me. Surely speakers of Chinese can speak of hypothetical situations, even if they wouldn’t use the familiar subjunctive of English, French, Spanish et al?
ISTR being taught in French that a waiter, annoyed with his minute tip, might say “Que voudriez-vous que je fasse avec trente-cinq centimes?” - literally “What would you that I do with 35 centimes?”, where we would say “What do you want me to do with…”
And yes, the English subjunctive mood (not tense, which is past/present/future/etc, not voice which is active/passive) is hard to spot. Occasionally it can be picked up because it looks like an infinitive stem instead of the expected “person” of the verb. For instance, at one point in the Holy Communion service in the prayer-book we used when I was a lad there was the direction The sermon (if there be one) which I took as an archaism, but was actually subjunctive be instead of indicative is.
Lucky is he who never had to learn Latin, in which there are more subjunctive verb forms than you can shake a stick at, if you be so minded. Accidence will happen…
Germain ain’t no piece of cake. They have a special conjugation of verbs when they are used in inderect quotations. Plus they use the subjunctive pretty normally, I suppose as much as we do in English. I can’t really be the authority, as there are most likely 3 more different subjunctive cases.
Really? I rather like it. I remember it being a lot easier to remember than some of the other conjugations (for regular verbs, of course). And it sounds really cool. There’s a French nursery rhyme I like to tell my neice (I’m trying to make her bilingual) that goes si le loup y etait, il nous mangerait which sounds so much cooler than if the wolf were here, he would eat us.
The subjunctive is used in subordinate clauses where the implied situation is contrary to fact, or where a hypothetical situation is advanced. “She asked that he give her a kiss” is a construction where a hypothesis is advanced – whether he does kiss her or not is immaterial; the point is that she’s proposing a concept not yet factual.
English has present and past subjunctives, but for most verbs the past subjunctive is indistinguishable from the indicative. The past subjunctive of “to be” is “were” in all numbers and persons except the obsolescent “thou” 2nd person singular, which takes “wert” – perhaps the rarest verb form in accurately constructed English.
The present subjunctive is extant but rare, owing to the fact that most clauses calling for the subjunctive are also required to be put in the “conditional past” – resulting in the “If I were you…” constructions. But the present subjunctive of all verbs is the naked base form of the verb, equal except for “to be” to the present indicative without the third-person-singular “-s” ending – and for “to be” is the form “be” in all numbers and persons. (“Thou” forms constitute an exception so rare as to not be worth discussing.)
Thank you very much indeed, Nametag, for clearing up this native French speaker’s years of confusion with what the English speakers call subjunctive, in two concise paragraphs. It was never clear to me, because it seemed to me to be the English equivalent of our conditional tense (the second subjunctive) while there seemed to be no equivalent to the French subjunctive. The first subjunctive you mention is the exact equivalence of the French subjunctive, and my year of puzzelment are at an end.
I have copied your post for future reference.
Let Nametag henceforth be knownas the sunbjunctive king!
This example doesn’t contain a subjunctive, though. It’s just an example of the rule “jamais de conditionnel avec ‘si’” - in an “if” phrase, you don’t use the conditional form but the indicative form.
So this awkward sounding New York (Brooklyn maybe) grammar is correct:
“You want that I should call you back ?”
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that were proper Yiddish structure. I’d ask my grandmother, who is a (rusty) native speaker, but every time I ask her something like that she ends up in a long and loud argument about it with my grandfather, who thinks he knows better (he usually doesn’t).
Polycarp, can you provide an example of this? The description is technically information, but I can’t quite “see” it. Oh, and thanks for clearing up “if I was” vs “If I were” for me 
The “that” clauses that take the subjunctive are usually in the present – “Ikawura43 asked that Polycarp provide an example,” for example 
Or consider Patrick Henry’s, “If this be treason, make the most of it!” (Obviously Henry did not consider his actions treason, so he used the subjunctive.)
Well, thanks! More vanity-fodder for my sig! (And you, in turn, are most welcome)
In The Elements Of Grammar, the author distinguishes between conditions contrary to fact and non-commital conditions.
“If John were angry at Tom, Tom would apologize” suggests that John is not angry at Tom at the moment. “If John is angry at Tom, Tom will apologize” suggests that the speaker doesn’t know or doesn’t care whether John is actually angry at Tom.
I don’t know how well this agrees with modern usage, but it’s interesting to note.
I know how to say that form. How is it spelled?
I remember reading about this Yiddish structure when I was studying German. In Deutsch, it would be something like, “moecthest du dass ich dich noch einmal telefoniere?” I know, mein Deutsch ist sehr schlecht.
Danshi wo hen hui jiang Zhongwen!