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(Spanish: "Si yo fuera/fuese rico, compraría una casa.") [66] The perfect past subjunctive (the imperfect subjunctive of haber and then a past participle) refers to an unfulfilled condition in the past, and the other clause would be in the perfect conditional: "Si yo hubiera/hubiese tenido dinero, habría comprado la casa" ("If I had been rich ...
Today, the two forms of the imperfect subjunctive – for example, "hubiese" and "hubiera", from "haber" – are largely interchangeable.* The -se form derives (as in most Romance languages) from the Latin pluperfect subjunctive, while the -ra form derives from the Latin pluperfect indicative. The use of one or the other is largely a matter of ...
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:
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 ...
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 choice between present subjunctive and imperfect subjunctive is determined by the tense of the main verb of the sentence. The future subjunctive is rarely used in modern Spanish and mostly appears in old texts, legal documents, and certain fixed expressions, such as venga lo que viniere ("come what may").
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.
Spanish verbs are a complex area of Spanish grammar, with many combinations of tenses, aspects and moods (up to fifty conjugated forms per verb).Although conjugation rules are relatively straightforward, a large number of verbs are irregular.