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The subjunctive (also known as conjunctive in some languages) is a grammatical mood, a feature of an utterance that indicates the speaker's attitude toward it.Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, obligation, or action that has not yet occurred; the precise situations in which they are used ...
For many German tenses, the verb itself is locked in a non-varying form of the infinitive or past participle (which normally starts with ge-) that is the same regardless of the subject, and then joined to an auxiliary verb that is conjugated. This is similar to English grammar, though the primary verb is normally placed at the end of the clause.
An imperative, in contrast, generally applies to the listener. When a language is said to have a jussive, the jussive forms are different from the imperative ones, but may be the same as the forms called "subjunctive" in that language. Latin and Hindi are examples of where the jussive is simply about certain specific uses of the subjunctive.
The grammar of the German language is quite similar to that of the other Germanic languages.Although some features of German grammar, such as the formation of some of the verb forms, resemble those of English, German grammar differs from that of English in that it has, among other things, cases and gender in nouns and a strict verb-second word order in main clauses.
In the German language, the jussive mood is expressed using the present subjunctive (named Konjunktiv I or Möglichkeitsform I in German). It is typical of formal documents or religious texts, such as the Bible. Because it was more common in past centuries, it has often survived in proverbs:
Middle High German had three moods, indicative, imperative, and subjunctive mood (used much more frequently in Middle High German than in the modern language). In addition to wishes and other unreal conditions, it is used after imperatives, after indefinite pronouns (such as swaȥ and swer), and after comparatives.
The subjunctive of the present is almost never used in colloquial German (and relatively infrequent in written German as well); the subjunctive of the past is more common, at least for some frequent verbs (ich wäre, ich hätte, ich käme etc.). The latter is used like a conditional mood in German (English: I would).
The indicative and subjunctive appeared in both tenses and both voices, while the imperative appeared only in the present active and had no first-person forms. The subjunctive mood derived from the PIE optative mood, and was used to express wishes, desires as well as situations that were not regarded as or known to be real by the speaker. It ...