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In the following example, the perfect subjunctive in the main clause is used to describe a future potential result: sī nunc mē suspendam, meīs inimīcīs voluptātem creāverim (Plautus) [86] 'if I were to hang myself now, I would simply have given my enemies pleasure' The following has the perfect subjunctive in both clauses:
In other examples in reported speech, the subjunctive in the 'if' clause represents an original present subjunctive with potential meaning: voluptātem, sī ipsa prō sē loquātur, concessūram arbitror dignitātī (Cicero) [60] 'I believe that Pleasure, if she were to speak for herself, would give way to Dignity'
The 2nd person imperfect subjunctive when potential is nearly always indefinite and generalising, i.e. an imaginary 'you': [344] crēderēs victōs (Livy) [345] 'you would have believed them beaten' In a conditional clause of comparison, the imperfect subjunctive indicates an imagined situation not at the present time but contemporary with the ...
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 ...
Examples are the English and French conditionals (an analytic construction in English, [c] but inflected verb forms in French), which are morphologically futures-in-the-past, [1] and of which each has thus been referred to as a "so-called conditional" [1] [2] (French: soi-disant conditionnel [3] [4] [5]) in modern and contemporary linguistics ...
The ancient Romans themselves, beginning with Varro (1st century BC), originally divided their verbs into three conjugations (coniugationes verbis accidunt tres: prima, secunda, tertia "there are three different conjugations for verbs: the first, second, and third" (), 4th century AD), according to whether the ending of the 2nd person singular had an a, an e or an i in it. [2]
A negative order can also use the perfect subjunctive: [8] dē mē nihil timuerīs [9] 'do not be afraid on my account' In later Latin, nē plus the present subjunctive became more common, for example in the Vulgate Bible. In the following example the first three verbs use the present subjunctive, and the third the perfect subjunctive:
1 In modern usage, the imperfect indicative usually replaces the imperfect subjunctive in this type of sentence. The subjunctive mood figures prominently in the grammar of the Romance languages, which require this mood for certain types of dependent clauses. This point commonly causes difficulty for English speakers learning these languages.