I like how he explained the subjunctive interpretation with a different sentence... that used the subjunctive! "Or are we insisting that somebody do so?" Not a bad illustration that the subjunctive is still active, at least in the US.
English sentences with "to insist" are my favorite examples to offer to doubters of why the English subjunctive still makes important semantic distinctions. But when I lived in England 1990-1992 I often heard indicative verbs after "demand," "insist," etc. that sounded outrageously ungrammatical to me. This so bothered me that I began trawling through transatlantic reference grammars of my own native language (!) until I came across an admission that the subjunctive has been much better preserved in North American English than it has in the UK. (I've lost the reference. It was a lifetime ago. But F. R. Palmer's own "The English Verb" is so UK-centric that it has no discussion of the subjunctive at all!) I demand that every Briton begin to use the subjunctive correctly!
@@natlewvt But people use language in a way that serves their purpose and that is why languages are constantly evolving. Even deviations from standard grammar follow their own particular rules and patterns of use and may or may not, over time, become the accepted form.
As a native Romance language speaker, this is probably the most well articulated and comprehensive presentation of the subjunctive I've ever seen. congrats!
You are way better off learning this by immersion through comprehensible input. I'm a Brazilian, and I also speak Italian, which I learned as an adult. So I certainly know how to USE this stuff. But I had no idea what the heck "subjunctive" was. So I watched this video to understand. and I still can't quite understand WHAT that thing is. But I sure can use it (by he examples). And what I also can't understand is why that it's so hard for English speakers. And one of the main reasons certainly is that you spend too much time trying to understand WHAT this is. I'm a native and a speaker of two Romance languages and I couldn't understand. Just listen to a bunch of native content and say like the natives say it. Period.
@@JohnnyLynnLee That's just the difference between learning a language and learning about a language. Some people like to do both, you know. I do agree that wasting too much energy in trying to understand WHAT this is isn't gonna be super helpful when it comes to using it correctly though.
@@carsarthu I agree you can do both and there's nothing wrong with it. As long as you KNOW you are doing that and are not thinking that by being able to memorize a grammar explanation necessarily your language skill will become any better.
Spanish is my third language, but I have been speaking it for 40 years. I have been teaching Spanish for 30 years. I don't remember struggling to learn the subjunctive because it was so long ago, but a couple of years ago, I had a 7 year old Spanish learner make an interesting observation about the indicative and the subjunctive. He said, "oh, I get. Cuando usamos el indicativo estamos hablando de algo que podemos indicar con el dedo índice, y cuando usamos el subjuntivo estamos hablando de un sujeto que existe en la imaginación." That isn't as complete an explanation as what you have given in this video, but I think the kid came pretty darn close to summing it all up.
There is a nominal category in Russian for "animate" which behaves differently than something "inanimate." Lots of people say animate = ALIVE, but it breaks weird around the edges with things like bacteria and gods and corpses, so the simple diagnostic we were taught to determine animacy is "if you kick it, will it yelp?" and this is much more effective than "alive."
Can you give and example of each, please (in simplest Spanish)? Something that you might say that you can point at and and something in the imagination. Gracias!
@@davekaiser7891 The Algonquian languages have this distinction too. I'm not sure how they categorize corpses but it's interesting that when John Eliot published a Bible in the Massachusett language in 1660, he imported the word "God" from English. I don't know if he understood the animacy thing, even after talking to Massachusett speakers for years.
In my final master's year, I researched the grammatical and semantic use of the conjunctive/subjunctive/optative as described in the grammar books for fifty (50!) languages spread across just about all phyla. Categorizing the uses, tallying in a matrix and crunching the numbers. The idea was to investigate and (dis)claim the potential existence of a common precursor to it. Except for a few among them, I found that just about all investigated languages had one semantic use of mood in common: the expression of a desired state, with all other semantic and grammatical applications of the mood being derived from there, like a vibrant paint bleeding into other wet areas of a sheet of paper. (Im)probability / Irrealis came in second. Even though most of the author-grammarians looked at the non-IE phyla through a Western lens and tried to classify what they observed using 19th C tools, and one has to be very caution with the material, it does appear to be the case that desiderative mood is the most common one, whereas the purely grammaticalized use of mood markers is the least common. But this was in the '90s, so I'm sure that science has come a long way since then and has reached far more interesting conclusions :)
A big break-through for my understanding of the subjunctive was thinking of it less as a separate weird thing but more as "not the indicative". Then the identification that the indicative is much stronger in romance languages (and especially Spanish) than in English - so when you don't want to make a strong indicative statement, more likely than not the phrase will take the subjunctive
Interestingly, I realized that my native Dutch is the same, but it doesn't even have a subjunctive. For most of rhe examples in the video, the Dutch translation would mean the indicative. We have to construct a whole different sentence to imply a subjunctive.
Agreed, I feel as though this video is very tailored to persons experienced in learning languages. All it did for me was make the subjuntive more confusing.
I concur, especially if English is not your first language. It may give me a head start for more complex grammar, but then I don’t know a precise subjunctive from German either or am confusing it with „Konjunktiv“.
After wading through it twice, I’m reminded of the old joke about the Microsoft engineer who offers directions to the lost balloonist. While likely to be technically accurate, this is almost completely useless to anyone trying to find a simple way forward. IOW, yeah, no.
As a speaker of Romance language (Spanish) I think I use "may" or "might" more than a native English speaker in an attempt to translate the subjuctive. In your example 21:06 "although she is little, she is fierce" I'd rather say "although she may be little, she is fierce". Saying "although she is little" sounds to me like she is actually little and not just an assumption. Another reason why I never mix "if I was" and "if I were" in English because in Spanish you have to distinguish them. "Si yo era/estaba" (If I was) "Si yo fuera/estuviera" (If I were). Si yo estaba ahí, fue porque quise ir = If I was there, it was because I wanted to go Si yo estuviera ahí, no estaría hablándote = If I were there, I wouldn't be talking to you
I’m learning Spanish and I also find myself doing this in English occasionally. While writing an essay it felt like some nuance wasn’t being conveyed and realized I was trying to use the subjunctive in English.
I'm a native French teacher who teaches to Chinese speakers. In mandarin, subjunctive is called 虛擬式 which literally means "virtual form". I think it really captures the essence of subjunctive as a description of something that's virtual, and not real, just like you explained. Like you, I am always appalled at 99% of teachers and books who talk about doubt or other nonsense like that. When I introduce The subjunctive form to my students, I always use a sentence similar to the one you mentioned : "je cherche un hôtel qui est situé près de la plage" (I'm looking for a hotel that's located near the beach. I know this hotel exists and I'm looking for it) and "je cherche un hôtel qui soit situé près de la plage" (I don't know if such a hotel exists but I'm looking for one like that). In the end, my students really quickly grasp the subjunctive quite quickly, and don't make it the "final boss" of French grammar like most people do.
Hi, student of French here. Could you maybe shed some light on the following question: I've never understood why the verb espérer doesn't take the subjunctive. It seems to me that if one were hoping for something, it would be an unrealized (virtual) proposition. Curiously, "I hope that he comes to the party" translates as «J'espère qu'il viendra à la fête» (no subjunctive); but "I am going to hope that he comes to the party" uses the subjunctive («Je vais espérer qu'il vienne à la fête»). Until now I've just had to accept that espérer is some kind of exception to the general feel of when the subjunctive is used, but it'd be nice to know why it's an exception. Thanks for any insight you can provide.
@@darenblythe5169 that's a really good question. One of the problems of the subjunctive is that its use has recently started to decline in French. For example, we don't use the subjonctif imparfait anymore, and as a result, subjunctive verbs tend to lose the temporality that indicative verbs have. I don't know if it's true, but my theory is that a verb like "j'espère que" can be followed by a past tense (j'espère qu'elle était là), a present tense (j'espère qu'elle est là) or a future tense (j'espère qu'elle sera là). Using a subjunctive mood would remove the subtlety of those 3 sentences. That's just my theory though...
I'm around half way between B1 and B2, but luckily I live in Spain so I hear subjunctive every day. Thankfully, I had a native teacher explain subjunctive to me in a very practical way. Basically, in VERY basic terms, the majority of the time 'que' directly after a lot of words/phrases will trigger the subjunctive. Yes, there are others without 'que' involved and obviously WAY more to it than that, but this is a great place to start, and to help get beyond and away from all the vague, philosophical terms that you often hear being taught online. The hard part about subjunctive isn't understanding the concepts, but rather dropping the crutch from earlier learning and try to use subjunctive at every opportunity in everyday speaking practice. Just listen and learn. Spanish children start using subjunctive LONG before they understand WHY they are using it. They listen. They learn. They know the simple triggers.
I think the key is to realize what indicative means. It means an accurate description of a real event of action, something that is (or was, or is going to be) or something that happens (or happened, or will happen). It's just the matter-of-fact mode, a plain description of reality. Subjunctive is used when indicative is not the right choice. Instead of remembering every instance where subjunctive should apply, just work by elimination: use subjunctive when indicative is not the correct form.
Native Romanian speaker here. It's interesting that the Romanian version of the subjunctive (called ”conjunctiv”) is used even with wishes and desires where the subject of the main clause is the same as the subject of the subordinate one. For example, while in English we would say ”I want to eat”, in Romanian it would be roughly ”I want that I eat”, where ”eat” is in subjunctive. It's as if a French person would say „Je veux que je mange” instead of ”Je veux manger”. And it makes sense if you think about it. The thing that is wished is virtual, unrealised.
Okay, I got to 22 minutes and my brain was full. All I know about subjunctive is that the new version of the song from Fiddler on the Roof drives me nuts EVERY time I hear "If I was a rich man" instead of "If I WERE a rich man."
Well, you've given me an eyetwitch without even hearing the song, so thank you. There's a line in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney) song "Out There" that goes "If I was in their skin I'd treasure every instant!" And it would have had an extra rhyme if it properly said "If I WERE in their skin I'd treaSURE every instant!"
@@ArkylieFunnily - this is my go-to audition song, and I changed it to “were” subconsciously and have sang it like that for years now. When I looked at the sheet music again randomly and saw that it was “…I was…” my mind was blown! (And yes… I still keep using “were”) 😂
What's confusing about 'if I were... I would...' is that it does not translate to subjunctive in romance languages: in French, at least, you use the indicative after the if (so, effectively, the equivalent of if I was) then the specific 'conditional' mood; no subjunctive 😅 It probably explains why 'if I was' is a common mistake we do when speaking English...
OMG I 've been avoiding all news since the election to preserve my sanity. Now I learn someone has decided to F up the subjunctive in that Tevye song. Proof that idiots are everywhere not just MAGA.
Ça veut dire: I don't believe that person could explain... Essayez l'un ou l'autre: "Je ne crois pas que quelqu'un puisse expliquer..." ou "Je crois que personne ne peut expliquer..." Bonne continuation!
@@evanbartlett1 To me, this sentence is correct; it's convoluted, but correct. I might be wrong, but I'd translate it like this: I don't think anybody could explain subjunctive as well as you do.
Learning French as a child, I was unaware there was anything special about the subjunctive. This was decently-explained, but I feel 2x or 3x as many examples (with comparative non-subjunctive examples) would have made your point clearer.
When I took Spanish, the mnemonic was "WEDDING". Wishing, Emotion, Doubt, Denial, Impersonal Expressions, Negative Belief, Giving Permission. More than 30 years ago, and I still remember it.
You should really do a video about intensifiers between languages. In English, you use "emphatic do" and get "do do" to mean "do (and I'm quite emphatically clear about this point)". In Spanish, you use "sí". In Mandarin, you use a few different ones depending on what mood, aspect, and context you're in ("就", "要", "是", and all the emphatic allofixes like "啊").
Add in "ain't" as an intensifier -- once I learnt that, I had a completely different view of the word. "I'm not going" plain, "I ain't going" emphatic. Don't think it applies to all uses of the term, but it's also useful as just a general "I don't care to conjugate" version, which, hey, so long as the rest is clear, conjugation optional I guess (various languages get away without it): "I ain't goin', you ain't goin', she ain't goin'."
@@Arkylie I wonder what you think of this: I would see "ain't" in this sense as an example of a _shift of register_ used to intensify. (Except of course where the speaker's dialect regularly uses "ain't" and does not use "am/is/are not": in which case, there is no shift of register to use "ain't." Though in an "ain't" context, a speaker COULD hypothetically get all formal and use "am not"!)
@@maletu I like the idea of shifting register to indicate intensity! It feels like this might tie into the same mental paths that make your brain slow down to read intricate fonts, thus switching to the Analysis Brain (logical analysis) instead of the React Brain (heuristics). Whatever is normal thus lets your brain skim over it, but what is unusual causes your brain to delay and thus can act as an intensifier in this manner. You've got me thinking!
@@maletu One thing I like about shifting to a more informal register to indicate emphasis is the implied future trajectory; "ask me again and I'm going to swear at you".
Thank you for taking the time to go through the logic. I have noticed that in e.g. English where the subjunctive forms have largely fallen into disuse or never existed to begin with and ambiguity follows if the sentence is spoken without any stress, we have a trick up our sleeves. We tend to use stress to convey the message anyway. The main problem comes when writing. Then it usually is better to just rewrite to avoid the ambiguity.
My Spanish teacher in high school used to talk about "nuestras pasaportes al mundo del subjuntivo!!" and she'd flap her arms and sorta dance around the room. Like we were flying to another world. It was kinda trippy.
I think you might have made a slip or two. At 15:17 we see the sentence “quizá viene” and you say “it uses the subjunctive in the main clause”, but “viene” is indicative, not subjunctive. Then at 17:17 you speak the words “No crea Usted que es tonto” - which matches your translation of “Don’t think that he is stupid” - but the transcription at the bottom of the screen has “no crea que Usted es tonto”, which would be “Don’t think that you are stupid”. I think maybe a couple of words got transposed. I’m not a hater! I love the video and the insights you are sharing! If it was - ahem - if it were someone else I wouldn’t bother posting, but I thought you’d want someone to point those things out. I hope I’m not wrong!
Thanks for the note on 15:17 that was confusing me. On 17:17 I'm confused partially by what seems to be a transcription error, and partially by what [it sounds like to me that] he is saying, "Creo" and "Crea" would lead to very different meanings. "No creo "= I don't believe, but "No crea" would mean "Don't [You formal] believe"
Also, shouldn't it be "no cree"? The verb is creer, an ER verb so in present indicative it'd be "cree" whereas "crea" would either be "creates" or the subjunctive for creer.
I started learning Spanish when I was around 30 years old (in 1989, to be precise). I followed language classes and I was taught the same "doubt, hypothesis, uncertainty etc crap" and I soon realized that that would really not work. Then I found, and read, the book "El subjuntivo, Valores y usos" from J.Borrego, J.G. Asencio and E.Prieto. They tackle it using "syntax first, then semantics" and that really corresponds to what you are saying, I think. Also the "Nueva gramática de la lengua española" from the RAE, especially chapter 25, uses the same approach (which is not surprising as J. Borrego, from my book above, is the editor in charge of that chapter. The Nueva gramática is much more detailed than the "el subjuntivo, valores y usos". First things first: you have to know about the different types of subordinates: "noun subordinate (subordinada sustantiva)", "relative subordinate (subordinada adjetiva)" and "adverbial subordinate (subordinada adverbial)". The indicative/subjunctive semantic opposition works differently for these different types of subordinates. Then, to make things easier, you also have the conditional sentences. You could classify those in one of the above described types, but it's much easier to treat them separately. And after you mastered all the above, you come to the quirks. Strange things happen when the principal verb is also in the subjunctive (el efecto bloqueador del subjuntivo) or when it is in the future tense (not documented in the Nueva gramática). But anyway, your video at least makes it clear that people should at last get rid of that WEIRDO thing. I participated in the Wordreference Spanish forums for more than 10 years, but I have given up because I was sick and tired trying to convince people over and over again that they should tackle the subjunctive in a structured way instead of those semantic only based systems and that includes the Ruiz Campillo "declaración-no declaración" crap.
Very interesting video as always. As a side note, for a French native speaker who also speaks fluent Spanish, one of the hurdles we face in Spanish is the use of the past subjunctive, normal and common in Spanish but that has completely disappeared from modern French, or at least from modern spoken French. Even writers tend to use only the present subjunctive. I’m not sure if it’s the main reason but past subjunctive in French leads to weird sounding and ambiguous verbal forms, among which one of the best known examples is “il aurait fallu que je le susse”…
This is great. I barely know any French or Spanish, but I used to teach subjunctive in English to foreign learners. This is pretty much how I taught it in English (certain structures with subordinate clauses plus certain negative or hypothetical meanings). Listing it by emotions like wishes or dreams doesn't really work too well because you can always encounter a new one, like the phrase "for fear that" which requires subjunctive but isn't a wish or a dream.
I am a native speaker of English with a reasonable education. I’m literate. I’ve been learning Spanish for several years and yes, the subjunctive mood is a challenge. And no, WEIRDO doesn’t help. But I wish you would’ve given your (simpler) explanation in simpler terms. I don’t have a doctorate in linguistics. From the comments here, I can see that much of your audience consists of language nerds. I say that with much respect and even lovingly, but I’m not one of them. I’m just trying to improve my skills. I just want to be able to have meaningful conversations, and seeing the title of your video, I thought it could help.
My mind is scrambled from the overload of information. 😳 You are a literal encyclopedia of language systems. I’m grateful yet even I cannot absorb all this detail. And I usually love details. 😂
@@RosanneLoriMalowany this one was a lot! I tried to keep hammering home the key points: structural triggers, and Unasserted propositions (which come in 1. Negated, 2. Unrealized, and 3. Presupposed)
Thank you, for acknowledging both that people have trouble with this feature and why we do. I owe you an apology as well, I had assumed I would leave this video with no better understanding of the subjunctive then I had started with. I had several literal a-ha moments watching this and I feel like if I were to go back to learning French right now (I probably won't) I might actually start making progress with the subjunctive.
Hi Language Jones. Thanks for tackling the subjunctive, it’s a great subject. I’ve been studying Spanish for 5 years and I’ve spent a lot of time on the subjunctive so I paid close attention to your video, took notes and thought about what was said. I understood that for “presupposed”, that this refers to phrases with 2 clauses, one of which contains background information in order for the speaker to assert something else. You gave this example: “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” “An example in Spanish would be: “Por delicioso que sea, no quiero comerlo”, “As delicious it is, I don’t want to eat it.” For the examples you gave after the 22:00 minute mark, I’m not sure they are actually “presupposed” statements. For “We insist the children are treated well,” this seems more like a structural phrase if it’s interpreted as being in the subjunctive, or at least it would be in Spanish, like the “want” phrases you discussed elsewhere in the video. Another way to say it would be “We want you to treat the children well” or in the passive so it’s more like the original phrase, “We want that the children are treated well.” “Querer” and “exigir” both trigger the subjunctive in Spanish. But yes, I agree that the statement’s meaning changes as you mentioned between the indicative and the subjunctive, however technically, it doesn’t seem like a “presupposed” statement. For “We decided to eat when they arrived,” this is more of a “hasn’t happened / unrealized” statement if it’s interpreted in the subjunctive. It doesn’t feel like either clause is background information so it doesn’t appear to be a “presupposed” statement. For “I'm going to move to a country where it never snows,” this also seems like a “hasn’t happened / unrealized” statement. It doesn’t feel like either clause is background information. For “He didn't leave because he was angry” and “I didn't know she was so intelligent”, these didn’t strike me as having subjunctive meanings, at least not in Spanish, as that is the Romance language I’m coming from. Regarding “He didn't leave because he was angry.” Your interpretations were: “Does this mean he stayed because he was angry? Indicative. Does it mean he left but not out of anger? Subjunctive.” Your interpretations are really just the reverse of each other, i.e. stay vs. left with opposite consequences, and so they don’t fit into the indicative/subjunctive dichotomy. To be a “presupposed” statement it would have to go something like, “As angry as he was, he didn’t leave.” For “I didn't know she was so intelligent”, the closest translation in Spanish for me would be “No sabía que era tan inteligente.” Negated “saber” doesn’t trigger the subjunctive in Spanish, but perhaps this is not the case in French? Based on this, it appears that discussing subjunctive in a general way with references to a few Romance languages is really tricky. I’d have loved to see you do separate videos for French and Spanish. The two seem very close, but it appears there’s a fair amount of difference as well. In any event, thank you for this video. I apologize if I have made any errors myself. Just wanted to share my feedback, my intentions were good. Regards.
It seems generally agreed that either the indicative or the subjuntive can follow "quiza" or "tal vez." So: "Quizá viene" OR "Quizá venga." BUT if you put either at the end, as if your doubt or caveat were an afterthought, you must use the indicative: "Viene, quizá."
Love this video, lots to say! First, yes please on mood / modality! That will be fun. For evidentials, if I remember correctly, in Aymara (Bolivia, Peru, Chile) there is something like reported speech, regular past, and distant past that I could not possibly have seen (sort of "we all know that THING HAPPENED but none of us ACTUALLY SAW IT." Lastly, I'm excited that you brought veridicality into the subjunctive. My dissertation was on how sentence structure and word semantics (negative looking stuff like "without") create non-veridicality / anti-veridicality and the resulting effects on polarity items (like "anyone"). When I got to the subjunctive in Spanish, I had a gut feel that this is non-veridicality, but your video put a lot more detail and clarity into it, thank you! Related, I suspect that you could collapse your first point, on "wanting" into "irrealis." I mean, I want that you go, but you haven't done it yet, so...maybe? Use of the infinitive when the subject of the main clause and subordinate clause is the same then is just a special case? I wonder how this works in Bulgarian. There is no infinitive, but an infinitive looking thing can act like a subjunctive...I'll have to look into this. Lastly, with the presupposition piece, I think the subjunctive use here has some sort of a "contrary to expectations" bit. The Shakespeare quote shows this: “Though she be but little, she is fierce!” We don't expect little things to be fierce. It would be weird to say "though she be really big, and powerful, and well-armed, she is fierce." Anyway, thanks again for this. Looking forward to whatever comes next.
For a few laughs, look at Bulgarian. The "official" language, which is an amalgamation of several dialects, has some wackiness where there are forms from one dialect and categories from another dialect that can theoretically be combined in the official language, but because they are sourced from different dialects, no one would eve actually say these things.
😂 You tickled my biologist funny bone, as little things are often fierce in our world. We are usually talking about between species, rather than within a species. However, even within some species we see sex changing (dichogamy) and size morphing occur … fish, amphibians, and reptiles. New realization unlocked … my perspective of the natural world could trip up my language studies!
I've found, in learning Spanish and Italian, that it's far easier to just get used to where the subjunctive is used by simply consuming a lot of it. Many constructions employing it are common enough. It also seems that no two languages agree on exactly when the subjunctive is used and when it's not, and there's little rhyme or reason to it. Spanish is hardly logical and systematic on this front (regarding 'creer' and 'pensar', which always require the subjunctive in Italian), yet Italian has its own share of words that all seem to be similar in meaning, yet do not all uniformly trigger the subjunctive. It seems far simpler to simply get used to it over time, seeing as natives make mistakes with those too.
Excellent. Added a lot of context to a method I once stumbled across and have always found very useful - the 'half-overheard conversation'. If you walked into a room and one person was saying to another ' . . . que él puede hacerlo' you would get a different 'gist' of their conversation than if you overheard, ' . . . que él pueda hacerlo'. OK, you wouldn't know what they were talking about, but with the second example you would at least have an idea of 'irrealis' about what was being said. Thinking 'what would someone take from a sentence if they only heard half of it' can help a lot with the indicative/subjunctive choice.
I've long thought it'd be neat to consider what gets left out if the speaker dies (or falls unconscious) mid-sentence. Murder mysteries in English spin on "It was [missing name]" or "She verbed [missing object]"; in Japanese you'd have "She object [missing verb]" or "She object verb [missing tense/negation," though of course the Japanese are good at guessing a lot of content from subtle variations in the earlier part of the sentence. Klingon would have "The ball taken [by] [missing actor(s)]." Now you've given me the opposite side of the coin, the "didn't hear the first half," and I gotta mull that one over a bit.
I took AP high school Spanish, but at the same time spent all my social time with Guatemalan immigrants whom I met working as a waiter. The subjunctive intuitively clicked then, and it's even adaptable to places where Spanish classes drew false hard lines. As a SLA guy, once I got into mood categories (namely realis vs. irrealis), and as a logician, once I learned modal semantics, I never really had to think about triggers. So, just do all of that, and the subjunctive will come naturally.
@@marcuskissinger3842 If you're a logic guy, you're going to L-O-V-E love formal natural language semantics. I just Googled this one: "Eventive modal projection: the case of Spanish subjunctive relative clauses". It starts out with de dicto/de re and only gets better from there.
@@marcuskissinger3842 Human language is a bit squishier than math, and I am a linguist who has used logic, not a logician, so pardon my rough cut at this, but the basic idea is that the indicative is like propositional logic: P or P(x), and you evaluate it in the "real world." In modal logic, as adapted to human language, the diamond is like "may" and the box is like "must," but rather than evaluating it in the "real world," you are evaluating it in "possible worlds." Thus, "John is home" is evaluated in the real world and it is true or false, where "it's possible that John is home" suggests several different worlds and in at least one, he is home, but we can't evaluate in the real world. In the latter, in Spanish, you would use the subjunctive: Es posible, que Juan este a casa" (not "esta a casa," indicative). So, oversimplified bottom line: if you open up a "world" variable with a modal, you would use subjunctive in Spanish, if not, use the indicative.
@@davekaiser7891 There's a fair bit more on the formal semantics side of this, where I found a nice intellectual home, but that is a good example of it applying. Here's an example from the Bible (Juan 16:7): "Pero yo os digo la verdad: Os es necesario que yo me vaya; porque si yo no me fuese, el Consolador no vendría a vosotros; mas si me fuere, os lo enviaré." Many of the modalities above are for necessity, as well.
PLEASE DO MODAL VERBS!! I am a new English teacher and want a better way to conceptualize them! Also, I would love if you did a whole video on just French subjunctive, more examples in French would be amazing!
Wow! What exactly about this is less complicated than other explanations? It is mindblowingingly complex. Things started to make a tiny bit more sense to me at 22:20 when you talk about the difference between the indicative and the subjunctive and how a sentence can have ambiguous meaning (in English) depending on which is at play. Everything before this was just noise to me LOL! I am going to take the examples you give in English and ask my Spanish teacher to help me understand how to express them in the indicative and in the subjunctive in Spanish. I can see why people give up at this point in the process! I feel like going up!! Thanks though for a very thought-provoking lesson. I now have a headache...
My suggestion: 1. know that it exists and roughly used for things that are not litteral descriptions. 2. get enough exposure in the target language that it becomes intuitive, without trying to find "the logic" that explains every use case. The problem with all these "analytical" approaches trying to find a universal rule is that the usage is already different across the various romance languages. How could there be a universal ground truth if the languages don't agree between each other.
@@broccoli9308 Thanks! That is good advice. I talked with my Spanish teacher about it and he suggested that I start by learning only two or three examples and practice changing up the sentences. From what I can tell, the conjugation of the subjunctive is no more difficult than any other tense. It is knowing when and how to use it that is challenging. I read and listen every day in Spanish. I think a first important step is being to to identify when the subjunctive is being used.
(I'm not a professional linguist, just sharing something that might help) The general concept of the subjunctive is that it is communicating something that doesn't occur in reality but presumptively could. Example sentence: Quiero que vayamos a la tienda. "I want that we go to the store" "We" isn't in fact going to the store, it is something desired by the subject in the dependant clause (i.e the part before que/that). Something desired is not something occuring definitively in reality, so the indicative mood isn't used as it asserts or states fact. That's the gist of it.
The English ambiguity you refer to gives us that common speech pattern in which we restate the same sentence with exaggerated emphasis. “No no, he DIDN’T leave because he WAS angry.”
Your explanation of the subjunctive explains what the subjunctive is very well, but I don't know if it helps language learners much more than the typical WEIRDO acronym, which to me at least seems simpler and while not explanatory, covers most of the use cases. At least for me, its easier to identify verbs associated with doubt or wishes than think about presupposition.
@@max_pin Not just knowing the verbs, I think native speakers have a deep, possibly subconscious understanding of its meaning, since there are situations where it is optional depending on what is meant. That's where I think this video is helpful: it provides the understanding part, so that when you do trigger it you can start to get that intuitive understanding and refine your perception of the shades of meaning implied by using or not using the subjunctive. You still have to learn the triggering verbs at least to some extent, especially since there are exceptions (e.g. to hope in French doesn't take the subjunctive, whereas in Spanish it does) but in my experience that is not enough.
That is true. Even though I'm a native speaker of two subjunctive-laden languages, the uses of this form in other languages don't align 100%, and learning others via recognizing triggering environments is I think the best way to start. Now I will say, it is true that you "get" it after a while, in the sense that at some point you start guessing which new verbs will have it -- and the deeper you get into the "feeling" of irrealis the video was talking about, the more often your guesses will be correct. At some point, it will feel like it's pure semantics -- it's "what you want to say."
@@max_pin No anglophone, they naturally aquire that growing up with a language, they don't need to think about which verb triggers it, it comes naturally to them. I will also add that some verbs can take both the subjunctive and indicative which can change the meaning of the sentence. The subjunctive can also be used by itself without a verb triggering it if the sentence it is in isn't stating something occuring in reality. It's useful to know which verbs trigger the subjunctive, but you won't get the full idea of it's function and what it's trying to communicate that way.
Maybe a little meta, but when you said, "we want that someone does something," I unironically, instinctively thought that I'd have said, "we want that someone DO something."
Nice video! Now I can finally remember without doubt (!) when to use “cuando” with subjunctive (= as soon as) and when to use it with indicative mood (= every time when). However, at 21:48 you address my biggest problem with subjunctive mood: Romance languages have conditionals, too. As a native (or born and raised, if you prefer) German speaker, I have only a marginal grasp of the difference. We use our Konjunktiv for both. A friend of mine, born and raised French-speaking, translates company websites from German to French - and even that friend often is not sure when to use the conditionnel in a subordinate clause. So, I’d really like a video on that difference.
I wish I could say this made the subjunctive easier -- at least as the thumbnail promised. Too many side comments, qualifiers, and an allegiance to other people's jargon. Or perhaps I'm not the intended audience, to far outside the discourse community. I kept feeling like I got suckered into that "One Little Trick" videos. HAIL, CAESAR!
Totally sending this channel to my son (who is applying to uni rn, and this is in his wheel house.) I love the "You want that I should…" phrasing is drawn directly from the native language that the ESL speaker originally spoke. We can learn so much from the mistakes of our neighbors who chose us.
Interesting video. I quite enjoyed that. When I first studied Spanish in junior high and high school, they taught the subjunctive WAY worse than what you described unhelpful methods to be. It was clear that the (non-native) teachers didn't know it much better than we did. When I really learned Spanish (well, kind of - it was in Mexico, hahaha), my friends mercilessly made fun of me for my complete lack of understanding of this form. If you are familiar with Mexicans in Mexico, you'd know that they meant no offense by this; it was just funny to them (I got a lot of razzing over por and para, and ser and estar as well, and so on and on). It didn't help any that my friends and I were usually stoned, too. But some of them had a clear enough understanding to help me with it a little bit, and I finally kinda got a feel for it without a complete understanding of it (much like my use of por and para, or my use of 了 in Mandarin, or indeed my brother's understanding of English subjunctive, gerunds/infinitives, etc.). But you actually explained it here in a way that I could really have used 20 years ago, hahaha. Still, thanks. I enjoyed the video.
Thank you very much for the reasons we use the subjunctive! I acquired the subjunctive with the rest of the language when I was living abroad and really didn't understand all the reasons why. I really appreciate knowing . . .
I was so hopeful that I would feel more comfortable with the subjunctive after this. Probably me, but I just got lost in all the asides and intricacies. I'm afraid I'll just have to learn the subjunctive the way native speakers do: Enough exposure that you just know what sounds right and what doesn't. That is why being exposed to native speakers who use correct grammar and vocabulary is so important. Let's face it. If you have to apply rules to decide what to say in real time, you'll never speak the language comfortably, neither for yourself and nor for those trying to converse with you.
I immigrated to Spain (from Israel) 6 years ago and started my Spanish learning journey here. I personally love the subjunctive! I think it’s a really cool means of expression 🤓 It helped me to realize that we have many similar phrases and expressions in Hebrew, but that in Hebrew we just don’t have a separate tense or mood for them. We just use the future tense, but in a lot of ways it’s essentially the same.
How timely! I'm in a Spanish school and have been studying present subjunctive for the past 2 weeks, and will be spending the next 3 weeks on imperfect subjunctive. I'll have to watch this again in a few weeks. Thanks!
Espero que te vaya bien y que tengas mucha suerte con eso. Ojalá que hayas disfrutado el subjuntivo presente y podrás aprender el subjuntivo imperfecto.
I live in a french speaking country and learnt french by speaking mostly so my subjuctive use was genuinely just based on vibes...thanks for finally explaining what my french speaking teachers themselves didn't explain that well
I appreciate the video, I've been learning French on and off for a few years and picked up Spanish not long ago, and I've learned to sometimes use the Subjuntive because that's just how you say certain phrases, I admit I won't be thinking about this when I construct sentences going forward, but I will remember it whenever I learn new phrases to commit to memory. It'll help a lot actually understanding the nuance of what the difference is supposed to be.
I'm a (sort of) native Spanish speaker born and raised in a Latin-American household, and this gave me a lot to think about. I feel like I often hear family members using the subjunctive in places where I wouldn't expect it right away, almost like a form of "flavoring" or "shading." This is probably the most principled, yet intuitive explanation I've heard yet of what's exactly going on there. Thank you!
Wow this is so awesome! I've been thinking about going into linguistics because of my interest in learning language. I'm a spanish major but thought about moving towards linguistics. But people telling me it's less about learning language and more about the mechanics of them, I thought I'd be waisting my time.
Thank you for both a great explainer in a relatively short amount of time of something that I never got proper lessons on, and a great community in the comments offering different native views and nuances from various languages to add to what you said.
You are doing a good job of showing why / how linguistics is an interesting field. I don't know if that is in any way your intent, but the content is having that effect.
Thank you Dr. Taylor "Language" Jones, just sent this to my buddies who still get tripped up by the subjunctive. Considering sending it to my HS Spanish and French teachers as well because this is more comprehensive and in-depth than anything I was ever taught
This is excellent thank-you. I was beginning to form my own ideas about when to use the subjunctive and this video gave me the language to properly express my ideas. The structural structures were fairly easy to spot with enough exposure to the language (and contrary to most definitions I had had until this video); the major break-through was the idea of "irrealis" - as soon as you defined it, everything fell into place. The examples at the end, contrasting ambiguous English with the clarity of the subjunctive was the icing on the cake.
I finally decided to sit through more then ~30 seconds of one of your videos, (short-form has given me terrible attention span), and it was totally worth it! You explained everything really well in an easy to understand way, and it was also much deeper the I probably would have gleaned from a short google search. I am learning Latin right now, so this should be helpful.
As a native French speaker (which is shorthand to mean it's the language I have been using in day-to-day life for all my life, leave me alone), I do feel like the subjunctive in French, more specifically informal French, is a lot weirder (ha) than this. It seems to me that it has eroded (probably due to the fact it's indistinguishable from the indicative in singular conjugations of 1st group verbs, and in the 3rd person plural in almost all verbs), and that the indicative may be used where the subjunctive used to be used. Notably, for example, in negation, where I don't feel like "Je pense pas que c'est" is incorrect in informal speech (though it definitely is in the standard). I'm also fairly certain not many people would actually say "Je cherche quelqu'un qui sache jouer de la guitare"; in fact, I wonder if the conditional ("Je cherche quelqu'un qui saurait jouer de la guitare") might be more common for this case, at this point. As for the examples at the end, most of them probably wouldn't use the subjunctive in French. Let me review them one by one. "We insist the children are treated well." -> Distinguished with subjunctive. "Nous insistons que les enfants sont bien traités." vs "Nous insistons que les enfants soient bien traités." "We decided to eat when they arrived." -> Distinguished, but I'd say more with the conditional than the subjunctive. "Nous avons décidé de manger une fois qu'ils sont arrivés." vs "Nous avons décidé de manger une fois qu'ils seraient/soient arrivés." "I'm gonna move to a country where it never snows." -> The distinction between indicative and subjunctive does not even exist (1st group verb, singular). "Je vais déménager dans un pays où il ne neige jamais." Ok, to be fair, we could replace the verb and say something like "Je vais déménager dans un pays où il n'y a jamais de neige". But even then, I don't think we would make a distinction. If we were to use either the subjunctive or the conditional, that would imply, like for the guitar example, that we don't know if there is one (like, one available, or one in the area, for the guitar example). But we DO know there are countries without snow, so there's no uncertainty, therefore indicative. I also think that the use of "où" rather than "que" heavily discourages the subjunctive. The use of the conditional would also be interpreted differently: "Je vais déménager dans un pays où il n'y aurait jamais de neige" could indicate something more like "in that country, there wouldn't be snow for me to endure". Which doesn't make it very different in meaning compared to the present indicative. "He didn't leave because he was angry." -> That's another weird one. "Il n'est pas parti parce qu'il était en colère" can mean either, but you COULD specify the latter meaning by using the conditional. "Il n'est pas parti parce qu'il aurait été en colère". But it creates a different ambiguity, because it can also mean that he would have been angry if he left. In any case, the subjunctive feels odd here, at least to me. I think the distinction would be better expressed saying something like "Il est resté parce qu'il était en colère" vs "Il est parti, mais pas parce qu'il était en colère". If we are using the original sentence, then the context is probably enough to specify which meaning we mean. Maybe by adding the actual reason in the second case, like "Il n'est pas parti parce qu'il était en colère, mais parce que..." "I didn't know she was so intelligent." I might be wrong here, but... Isn't this example weird even in English? I don't know that there is ambiguity in this one. I'm pretty sure for the second meaning, one would say something more like "I didn't think she was that intelligent." Again, I might be wrong, feel free to correct. In any case, in French, we would say "Je ne savais pas qu'elle était aussi intelligente." vs "Je ne trouvais pas qu'elle était si intelligente (que ça)." Heck, we might use the passé composé for the latter, even: "Je n'ai pas trouvé qu'elle était si intelligente (que ça)". No subjunctive involved. I'm a bit sad, because I struggle to explain the subjunctive to people, and I was hoping this video would help, and while it does kind of help bringing together some ideas that were once separate, it also doesn't really help with the much weirder side of French subjunctive, especially in informal speech, and that's usually the part that I think is most confusing to people.
Awesome video! Thanks! Just like everyone else said, the content is great, with good explanations & examples. But what I like most is the smooth and entertaining you present. All those little jokes with the subtle &/or quick flashes of text or images, plus exactly the right amount of self-depricating digs. I could watch this guy for days. Thanks heaps. Keep up the good work!
I loved this video, very informative as always. For me, as a native Brazilian Portuguese speaker, the problem arises when we use the subjunctive differently in other Romance languages. For instance, I have the impression that we use the subjunctive in a much more relaxed way than French, in both directions. We also have something unique to Iberian languages, the future subjunctive, which we kind of invented and didn't exist in Latin, so... So there you have it. I've been living in France for ten years now, and I still make mistakes when it comes to subjunctive sentences, because the usage isn't the same... 🤣
I really appreciate this! I love hearing the logic and structure of language explained. It's the whole "fish doesn't know what water is" analogy: it's hard to think about these structures because we "breathe" them constantly. Thank you, and, yes, please more of this. Modality sounds like a great topic. Side note: I had to google the Ralph Fiennes movie ("Hail, Caesar!" 2016). I'd never heard of it before, but I love the Coen brothers, and I'm definitely going to check it out!
When my twin daughters were 4 we were playing a game and choosing coloured pieces and daughter R asked me “is it ok if F be’s yellow?” If she was simply asserting she totally would have just said ‘F is yellow’. I thought it was a lovely example of how there is an instinctive semantic distinction that the subjunctive expresses, even when we’re young.
I not that interested in linguistics as a subject, and I'm not sure I could even have defined subjunctive, but this made perfect sense. Great explanation!
I’m a native English speaker from Canada. I studied Spanish literature and history in Madrid and I understand the use of the subjunctive when I read it but struggle to explain it in English. And that what was many years ago and my skills have become rusty. This video was a good refresher. Thank you!
Interesting! I also have a Ph.D. in linguistics from Rice University in Houston, Texas, and I also like to learn languages just as much as dissecting them (nothing wrong with some good ol' linguistic analysis -- where would we be without hyphens, square brackets, and tree diagrams -- but hey, speaking those languages is also cool!). (Have you read Wolfgang Klein's little book on aspect and tense as parts of one and the same variable? It might change some of the introduction of your video.) I only have one disagreement with what you say here (and I'll expound on it below; like a good linguist, I love to make my comments look like articles being made ready for publication...): the subjunctive is indeed a reflection of irrealis, but this has been changing through time, and it's been becoming more and more like the W.E.I.R.D.O. table makes it look like: a triggered, knee-jerk reaction to a certain syntactic environment. It's not there yet (by far!), but the writing is on the wall. So, let's play! 🙂 As a native speaker of Portuguese and Spanish, I never really had to fight with the subjunctive; it just 'made sense' to me. But as I saw others struggling with it in their attempt to learn Romance languages, I began to question my own knowledge. How do I 'know' that "eu gostaria" HAS TO BE followed by a subjunctive "que ele VIESSE" (= I'd like him to come)? (And Portuguese is hardcore enough to have even a subjunctive future, besides having an inflectible infinitive...). When I look at my own usage of English vs. Spanish/Portuguese, what strikes me is that the latter languages have different ways of dealing with irreality, with 'non-declarativity'. As I speak, I realize something I'm saying is not really a claim -- I'm not saying anything about reality, I'm talking about a 'dreamworld' of wishes, desires, presuppositions, hypotheses, counterfactuals, projections, conjectures, etc. that relates to reality in that it will influence my actions in the real world (if 'I want Helen to go to the restaurant with me', I'm probably going to stand up and go talk to Helen), but are not themselves actions in the real world. When I speak Portuguese or Spanish, I'm more acutely aware of that: this is not a claim, I should show that in my grammar, typically (though not always) by using the subjunctive, because, if I don't, I'll mislead the hearer into thinking this is a claim about reality. English doesn't do that, though there are still little remnants here and there of a time when it did ("If I WERE you..."). TL;DR -- I don't think it's ever about "structure" (same subject or not, subordinate clause or not) as it is about what I want the hearer to think. Even in the cases in which you say the real question is whether or not the subject is the same in main and subordinate clauses ("I want to go", "I want you to go"), there is no structural reason why the subjunctive should be the TAM form used in the subordinate clause. It could perfectly well be the indicative -- if it weren't (
Very funny video, Herr Doktor Language Jones.😂. And a few hidden pearls to find here, too! I won't say, like the Queen of Hearts, "¡que le corten la cabeza!"
Oh wow, this is so helpful and clear! I believe I'm three and a half units from finishing the Duolingo French course, and I took classes in middle school, high school, and college, but I still trip over subjunctive so frequently.
WOW, I think I need to listen a couple of more times. Perhaps I avoid problems as a Chinese linguist. I hope there is a future video on aspect. During my short time that I studied Spanish, I was under the impression that certain stock phrases people used were always in the subjunctive.
"We insist that the children BE treated well." (If a wish or demand, not an assertion of fact.) I see no point in stripping the poor rags of subjunctive that English may still retain... Couple of years ago, frustrated by the myriad not-fitting-together schemata of how to use the subjunctive in Spanish, I conflated a couple of the more promising ones, and started collecting example sentences (from my reading: mostly translations of old s/sf novels I read in adolescence: but being choosy about translators) AND THEN TRYING TO FURTHER REARRANGE AND SIMPLIFY MY SCHEMA in light of those sentences. Messed with this, off and on, for about 6 months-though I could not interest any iTalki tutor in looking at the project. Then life intervened. But now your video is making me want to go back and see how your schema corresponds/doesn't correspond to what I was doing, and ponder. Thank you!
That was also my immediate reaction to his example with "insist." His example sentence sounded very unnatural, because I don't believe I ever use "insist" in an assertive sense. I use it for a demand, but then I always use the subjunctive.
@@jhfenton Interesting. I do use "insist" in the other sense-and I insist that it is also correct. (Being pedantic and stubborn, it comes naturally to me to insist on the truth or falsehood of many things.) Moreover, people commonly demand-insist that their desired outcome is accomplished. That is becoming correct, or correct-ish, as English looses its subjunctive. BUT the subjunctive form-and without a modal word, at that!-is still reasonably common in a construction like this. Also legal use: to direct that the money BE paid into an escrow fund, or some such.
@@jhfenton Probably because when we could say insist as a method of clearing up doubt, we instead say "promise" or "assure", as in "I assure you that the children are treated well." Probably because it's hard to differentiate between insist as a demand and as an assertion.
Of course we avoid it while retaining the meaning by saying "treat the children well" Honestly it's a better sentence bc why say "I insist" when your can just, you know, INSIST. Reminds me of "I should like to say you are pretty" (don't tell me you want to say it, just say it: "you're pretty") "I think that xyz." How about just say "xyz"? Obviously if you're saying it, you think it!
@@TheoMurpse As to the latter, there's a difference. "I think X" is a qualification, "X" is just an absolute. They're not the same. I suspect similar shades apply to your other examples.
As it happens, I actually own a copy of the first edition of Mood and Modality, which I bought back around 1990 for $14.95 (~$36 in today's dollars), but I see that the second edition is currently selling for $72 on Amazon. So, never cheap, and getting dramatically more expensive by the decade. Anyway, well worth reading, but pretty dense, so don't expect to breeze through it casually and then suddenly use the Spanish subjunctive correctly and fluently. It's theory, and it will explain a lot of things that might otherwise be mystifying, but you will still need to see lots of practical examples, and practice using them, just like any other feature of the language you are studying. Still, it's a better explanation than what you might normally see in a traditional classroom - always assuming that you have both the cash to buy the book and the sheer patience to wade through it all.
Thanks so much for making this! Really helps clarify things that have confused me in studying French. By all means, make the videos you tease at the end - I'll watch 'em all!
In London the subjunctive 'be' has become something of a relic in all codes but it's still understood through the study of Shakespeare and Dickens etc. Because of this, I think we can still use the English subjunctive to help explain the use of the subjunctive, its effects and its power in other languages.
great video. I took a break from memorizing all the verb forms of the most common Spanish verbs to embark on a project to visually read all 7 volumes of Harry Potter in Spanish while at the same time listening to the respective Spanish language Audiobook. Am 35% through volume 6. This video made me fondly think of all the Spanish grammar I learned in the past and now only vaguely remember.
After watching this and beginning to finally grasp the subjunctive (thank you Dr. Jones!) I came across this example in English from 100 years ago by the poet Charlotte Mew that illustrates Taylor's point quite well, and how we've got rid of it. It's in dialect and deliberately uses the wrong pronoun but I think the subjunctive use is correct. The Farmer's Bride of the poem has run away and the villagers are speculating about her location: "Out 'mong the sheep, her be," they said We would now say something like "I bet (that) she's out with the sheep" to express the doubt or "She's out with the sheep" if we know that she's there or wish to be ambiguous. If we retained the subjunctive we would say either "She is out with the sheep" (I saw her) or "She be out with the sheep" (I'm guessing) to disambiguate. I've always struggled with this in French and was dreading it when approaching it in Spanish. I assumed I'd have to learn all the examples. Now I will just embrace it. Fun Fact: Did you know that the motto of the Order of the Garter, "Honi soit qui mal y pense" and included in the coat of arms of the British Royal Family, uses the subjunctive? "Shamed be whoever thinks badly of it"
The place to start with subjunctive is to show English speakers that they use it all the goddamn time. They just don't realize it, because they think they're using indicative past tense, future tense, or present tense. Once they understand that they are already masters of subjunctive, that makes it far far easier to teach. If I were you, that is what I would stress. See, right there, two present tense subjunctive clauses that most English speakers would tag as "past tense" and "future tense". And to be sure, the FORMS look like past tense and future tense, which feels proper since there is a cause followed by an effect. But nope, it's all present tense subjunctive. Then there's the "long live the king" / "thy kingdom come" / "I move that he be expelled" type of subjunctive. Again, when you're aware that you use it in English without even thinking, you'll have a sense of when to use it in other languages. You mentioned that German sort of has subjunctive; what German has is IDENTICAL to English subjunctive, but for two small differences: 1) They call it "Konjunktiv". 2) They are good enough to slap an umlaut on the vowel in the verb and/or tweak the inflection so you have an explicit cue that it's Konjunktiv. German is also more likely to use subjunctive in the "doubt" sense than English ("she said she be 18 years old"), but from what I hear they're starting to drift away from that too, like English has.
I think a lot of language teachers only focus on concept #1, the structural triggers, which makes it much harder to understand what the subjunctive is actually communicating in other contexts. It’s easy for a French teacher to say “if x,y, or z then subjunctive and you’ll be right 90% of the time” than it is to explain cases in which the subjunctive is actually used to communicate different meanings. And starting with this just makes the subjunctive feel like an arbitrary grammatical rule. I feel like when teaching to a language learner, it’d make more sense to start with concept #2 to show the nuances that the subjunctive can be used to communicate. Then learning the structures in concept #1 would be more straightforward, if you’ve already conceptually learned what the subjunctive is used for, then you can learn how else it can come up without wondering how the hell it’s supposed to be useful. The French examples in concept #2 helped me a lot.
This is an excellent video on the topic - and I think nobody else talks about this because nobody else actually understands the subjunctive, certainly not to the extent you explain it here.
Fun fact: some languages use the subjunctive even for "I want to go", typically because they don't have an infinitive. See Greek, Romanian (though it does have an infinitive), Tosk Albanian. Gheg Albanian is the other extreme, using the infinitive even where the subjects of the two clauses are different.
Also, Romanian is the odd one out again amongst the Romance languages, having only minimally different verb forms for the subjunctive (aside from the copula).
@@hundertzwoelf I don't speak Romanian but the feeling I get from trying to read it is "this is 5th-century Latin somewhat simplified for Magyar- and Slavic-speaking learners." (Magyar grammar is lightyears away from Latin)
Coming from a long-time Spanish learner, that was some good breakdown. I'm currently trying to pick up Georgian and I kept thinking how great it would be had you gone into the optative, as to my amateur eye it seems to largely overlap in functionality with Romance subjunctives, just under a different name. Though that's probably way too in the weeds and specific for most viewers.
Wow. I never had WEIRDO shoved down my throat, but for sure my Spanish teachers have focused almost exclusively on triggers and use cases. It’s so much easier - and more accurate - to present it this way. !Muchísimas gracias, parcero!
I'm gonna recommend this video to everyone who's learning a language, cuz this entire video is gold. I finally feel like i understand just what the hell the subjunctive is! Thank you!
Loved it! (And I was waiting and waiting for the French example that finally came near the end (my own fave: Je cherche un homme qui est grand et beau/Je cherche un homme qui soit grand et beau) Please keep making videos like this.
Thank you so much! This one was a lot more wonky, and I was afraid I'd lose people. If I do it right with this channel, I feel that I might be teaching people something useful, but that they didn't know they wanted. TH-cam consistently encourages me, strongly, to just make videos like "can you learn two languages at once" (which I did, and it did well) but I think that people just don't know to ask what they don't know to ask. Getting it to them in a way that's interesting, though, is really hard, so I appreciate that you liked the video!
@@languagejones6784 I taught languages for 28 years and modestly dare to say I'm a "polyglot" (CI French/ B2 German and Russian) I did barely any linguistics at university and I love how you make difficult concepts easier to grasp - that is the mark of a Good Teacher.
This video came at a perfect moment for me, as I am about to tackle subjuntive in Portuguese. I couldnt help but notice some parallels between how you described subjunctive to how we use conditional in Polish (my primary) and now I know that for the forseeable future I'll be confusing subjunctive and conditional in Portuguese.
Native Portuguese speaker here. Note that there are conditional tenses in Portuguese as well, but they're called "subjunctive" (because the conditional uses of the Portuguese subjunctive go beyond conditional); there is a tense traditionally called "future of preterite" that I wished were called "future subjunctive" because it's really what it is, but... A way I used when I was trying to learn Polish is to consider the "ł-by"-conditionals (like Russian "бы") as having more restricted uses: they only occur in hypothetical contexts ("If I were a king..."), whereas the Portuguese subjunctive occurs in more contexts. Let's say you consider hypothetical uses like "Czytałbym książkę" = "eu leria o livro" as a "beginning" and then just said, but in Portuguese there are various subjunctive conjugations, and they have more uses than the Polish conditional. Maybe that will help? I hope it does! 🙂
22:16 Spanish makes the same distinction but with an extra detail: "Busco _a_ alguien que _toca_ guitarra" vs "Busco alguien que _toque_ guitarra". With the subjunctive, the person is non-specific, so the personal direct object marker _a_ is not required. Whether *"Busco a alguien que toque guitarra" is grammatical, I don't know. To my non-native ear, it seems like it could mean "I'm trying to find a specific person in order to get them to play the guitar" (i.e. _para que_ toque) but that's pretty contrived. Can a native speaker comment?
"We insist that the children be treated well." "We insist that the children are treated well." That's a dialog right there.
I like how he explained the subjunctive interpretation with a different sentence... that used the subjunctive! "Or are we insisting that somebody do so?" Not a bad illustration that the subjunctive is still active, at least in the US.
English sentences with "to insist" are my favorite examples to offer to doubters of why the English subjunctive still makes important semantic distinctions. But when I lived in England 1990-1992 I often heard indicative verbs after "demand," "insist," etc. that sounded outrageously ungrammatical to me. This so bothered me that I began trawling through transatlantic reference grammars of my own native language (!) until I came across an admission that the subjunctive has been much better preserved in North American English than it has in the UK. (I've lost the reference. It was a lifetime ago. But F. R. Palmer's own "The English Verb" is so UK-centric that it has no discussion of the subjunctive at all!) I demand that every Briton begin to use the subjunctive correctly!
@@natlewvt I support your demand that every Briton begins to use the subjunctive correctly!
Were I pedantic about such things, I would agree!
@@natlewvt But people use language in a way that serves their purpose and that is why languages are constantly evolving. Even deviations from standard grammar follow their own particular rules and patterns of use and may or may not, over time, become the accepted form.
As a native Romance language speaker, this is probably the most well articulated and comprehensive presentation of the subjunctive I've ever seen. congrats!
You are way better off learning this by immersion through comprehensible input. I'm a Brazilian, and I also speak Italian, which I learned as an adult. So I certainly know how to USE this stuff. But I had no idea what the heck "subjunctive" was. So I watched this video to understand. and I still can't quite understand WHAT that thing is. But I sure can use it (by he examples). And what I also can't understand is why that it's so hard for English speakers. And one of the main reasons certainly is that you spend too much time trying to understand WHAT this is. I'm a native and a speaker of two Romance languages and I couldn't understand. Just listen to a bunch of native content and say like the natives say it. Period.
@@JohnnyLynnLee That's just the difference between learning a language and learning about a language. Some people like to do both, you know.
I do agree that wasting too much energy in trying to understand WHAT this is isn't gonna be super helpful when it comes to using it correctly though.
@@carsarthu I agree you can do both and there's nothing wrong with it. As long as you KNOW you are doing that and are not thinking that by being able to memorize a grammar explanation necessarily your language skill will become any better.
Spanish is my third language, but I have been speaking it for 40 years. I have been teaching Spanish for 30 years. I don't remember struggling to learn the subjunctive because it was so long ago, but a couple of years ago, I had a 7 year old Spanish learner make an interesting observation about the indicative and the subjunctive. He said, "oh, I get. Cuando usamos el indicativo estamos hablando de algo que podemos indicar con el dedo índice, y cuando usamos el subjuntivo estamos hablando de un sujeto que existe en la imaginación." That isn't as complete an explanation as what you have given in this video, but I think the kid came pretty darn close to summing it all up.
That's a REALLY good first approximation
There is a nominal category in Russian for "animate" which behaves differently than something "inanimate." Lots of people say animate = ALIVE, but it breaks weird around the edges with things like bacteria and gods and corpses, so the simple diagnostic we were taught to determine animacy is "if you kick it, will it yelp?" and this is much more effective than "alive."
A 7 year-old said this?
Can you give and example of each, please (in simplest Spanish)? Something that you might say that you can point at and and something in the imagination. Gracias!
@@davekaiser7891 The Algonquian languages have this distinction too. I'm not sure how they categorize corpses but it's interesting that when John Eliot published a Bible in the Massachusett language in 1660, he imported the word "God" from English. I don't know if he understood the animacy thing, even after talking to Massachusett speakers for years.
In my final master's year, I researched the grammatical and semantic use of the conjunctive/subjunctive/optative as described in the grammar books for fifty (50!) languages spread across just about all phyla. Categorizing the uses, tallying in a matrix and crunching the numbers. The idea was to investigate and (dis)claim the potential existence of a common precursor to it.
Except for a few among them, I found that just about all investigated languages had one semantic use of mood in common: the expression of a desired state, with all other semantic and grammatical applications of the mood being derived from there, like a vibrant paint bleeding into other wet areas of a sheet of paper. (Im)probability / Irrealis came in second.
Even though most of the author-grammarians looked at the non-IE phyla through a Western lens and tried to classify what they observed using 19th C tools, and one has to be very caution with the material, it does appear to be the case that desiderative mood is the most common one, whereas the purely grammaticalized use of mood markers is the least common.
But this was in the '90s, so I'm sure that science has come a long way since then and has reached far more interesting conclusions :)
A big break-through for my understanding of the subjunctive was thinking of it less as a separate weird thing but more as "not the indicative". Then the identification that the indicative is much stronger in romance languages (and especially Spanish) than in English - so when you don't want to make a strong indicative statement, more likely than not the phrase will take the subjunctive
☝This is the way.
Interestingly, I realized that my native Dutch is the same, but it doesn't even have a subjunctive. For most of rhe examples in the video, the Dutch translation would mean the indicative. We have to construct a whole different sentence to imply a subjunctive.
That was a big info dump. I need to listen to it a couple more times to get it straight in my head.
Agreed, I feel as though this video is very tailored to persons experienced in learning languages. All it did for me was make the subjuntive more confusing.
@@strykebolten4485yeah, I'm only a beginner Spanish speaker. I don't know much about this, it's a little too specialized for me
I concur, especially if English is not your first language. It may give me a head start for more complex grammar, but then I don’t know a precise subjunctive from German either or am confusing it with „Konjunktiv“.
After wading through it twice, I’m reminded of the old joke about the Microsoft engineer who offers directions to the lost balloonist. While likely to be technically accurate, this is almost completely useless to anyone trying to find a simple way forward.
IOW, yeah, no.
Exactly. 😇 😅
That clickbait title though.
I mean, I like languagejones (because we share a name 😊), but maybe it shouldn't be necessary IMHO. 😇 😅
As a speaker of Romance language (Spanish) I think I use "may" or "might" more than a native English speaker in an attempt to translate the subjuctive. In your example 21:06 "although she is little, she is fierce" I'd rather say "although she may be little, she is fierce". Saying "although she is little" sounds to me like she is actually little and not just an assumption. Another reason why I never mix "if I was" and "if I were" in English because in Spanish you have to distinguish them. "Si yo era/estaba" (If I was) "Si yo fuera/estuviera" (If I were).
Si yo estaba ahí, fue porque quise ir = If I was there, it was because I wanted to go
Si yo estuviera ahí, no estaría hablándote = If I were there, I wouldn't be talking to you
I’m learning Spanish and I also find myself doing this in English occasionally. While writing an essay it felt like some nuance wasn’t being conveyed and realized I was trying to use the subjunctive in English.
I'm a native French teacher who teaches to Chinese speakers. In mandarin, subjunctive is called 虛擬式 which literally means "virtual form". I think it really captures the essence of subjunctive as a description of something that's virtual, and not real, just like you explained.
Like you, I am always appalled at 99% of teachers and books who talk about doubt or other nonsense like that.
When I introduce The subjunctive form to my students, I always use a sentence similar to the one you mentioned : "je cherche un hôtel qui est situé près de la plage" (I'm looking for a hotel that's located near the beach. I know this hotel exists and I'm looking for it) and "je cherche un hôtel qui soit situé près de la plage" (I don't know if such a hotel exists but I'm looking for one like that).
In the end, my students really quickly grasp the subjunctive quite quickly, and don't make it the "final boss" of French grammar like most people do.
I really love that term!
Hi, student of French here. Could you maybe shed some light on the following question: I've never understood why the verb espérer doesn't take the subjunctive. It seems to me that if one were hoping for something, it would be an unrealized (virtual) proposition. Curiously, "I hope that he comes to the party" translates as «J'espère qu'il viendra à la fête» (no subjunctive); but "I am going to hope that he comes to the party" uses the subjunctive («Je vais espérer qu'il vienne à la fête»). Until now I've just had to accept that espérer is some kind of exception to the general feel of when the subjunctive is used, but it'd be nice to know why it's an exception. Thanks for any insight you can provide.
@@darenblythe5169 that's a really good question. One of the problems of the subjunctive is that its use has recently started to decline in French. For example, we don't use the subjonctif imparfait anymore, and as a result, subjunctive verbs tend to lose the temporality that indicative verbs have. I don't know if it's true, but my theory is that a verb like "j'espère que" can be followed by a past tense (j'espère qu'elle était là), a present tense (j'espère qu'elle est là) or a future tense (j'espère qu'elle sera là). Using a subjunctive mood would remove the subtlety of those 3 sentences. That's just my theory though...
I'm around half way between B1 and B2, but luckily I live in Spain so I hear subjunctive every day. Thankfully, I had a native teacher explain subjunctive to me in a very practical way. Basically, in VERY basic terms, the majority of the time 'que' directly after a lot of words/phrases will trigger the subjunctive. Yes, there are others without 'que' involved and obviously WAY more to it than that, but this is a great place to start, and to help get beyond and away from all the vague, philosophical terms that you often hear being taught online.
The hard part about subjunctive isn't understanding the concepts, but rather dropping the crutch from earlier learning and try to use subjunctive at every opportunity in everyday speaking practice.
Just listen and learn. Spanish children start using subjunctive LONG before they understand WHY they are using it. They listen. They learn. They know the simple triggers.
I think the key is to realize what indicative means. It means an accurate description of a real event of action, something that is (or was, or is going to be) or something that happens (or happened, or will happen). It's just the matter-of-fact mode, a plain description of reality.
Subjunctive is used when indicative is not the right choice. Instead of remembering every instance where subjunctive should apply, just work by elimination: use subjunctive when indicative is not the correct form.
Native Romanian speaker here. It's interesting that the Romanian version of the subjunctive (called ”conjunctiv”) is used even with wishes and desires where the subject of the main clause is the same as the subject of the subordinate one. For example, while in English we would say ”I want to eat”, in Romanian it would be roughly ”I want that I eat”, where ”eat” is in subjunctive. It's as if a French person would say „Je veux que je mange” instead of ”Je veux manger”. And it makes sense if you think about it. The thing that is wished is virtual, unrealised.
Okay, I got to 22 minutes and my brain was full. All I know about subjunctive is that the new version of the song from Fiddler on the Roof drives me nuts EVERY time I hear "If I was a rich man" instead of "If I WERE a rich man."
Well, you've given me an eyetwitch without even hearing the song, so thank you.
There's a line in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney) song "Out There" that goes
"If I was in their skin I'd treasure every instant!"
And it would have had an extra rhyme if it properly said "If I WERE in their skin I'd treaSURE every instant!"
@@ArkylieFunnily - this is my go-to audition song, and I changed it to “were” subconsciously and have sang it like that for years now. When I looked at the sheet music again randomly and saw that it was “…I was…” my mind was blown! (And yes… I still keep using “were”) 😂
WHAT?! That’s horrific.
What's confusing about 'if I were... I would...' is that it does not translate to subjunctive in romance languages: in French, at least, you use the indicative after the if (so, effectively, the equivalent of if I was) then the specific 'conditional' mood; no subjunctive 😅
It probably explains why 'if I was' is a common mistake we do when speaking English...
OMG I 've been avoiding all news since the election to preserve my sanity. Now I learn someone has decided to F up the subjunctive in that Tevye song. Proof that idiots are everywhere not just MAGA.
Je ne crois pas que personne puisse expliquer le subjonctif aussi bien que vous. Merci !
Ça veut dire: I don't believe that person could explain...
Essayez l'un ou l'autre:
"Je ne crois pas que quelqu'un puisse expliquer..."
ou
"Je crois que personne ne peut expliquer..."
Bonne continuation!
@@evanbartlett1Je n'ai pas vu cette double négation. Merci 👍
@@evanbartlett1 To me, this sentence is correct; it's convoluted, but correct. I might be wrong, but I'd translate it like this: I don't think anybody could explain subjunctive as well as you do.
@@OlivierDALETYeah, no. Not anybody. Nobody. Which is why it doesn't make sense
@@emile_fa several examples of this construction: www.google.com/search?q=%22je+ne+crois+pas+que+personne+puisse%22
as a heritage speaker of spanish, i love you
Learning French as a child, I was unaware there was anything special about the subjunctive. This was decently-explained, but I feel 2x or 3x as many examples (with comparative non-subjunctive examples) would have made your point clearer.
When I took Spanish, the mnemonic was "WEDDING". Wishing, Emotion, Doubt, Denial, Impersonal Expressions, Negative Belief, Giving Permission. More than 30 years ago, and I still remember it.
uhh, that doesn't sound healty xD (you probably meant mnemonic, not pneumonic...)
@@nap247 Corrected ... ugh.
WEDDIEGP?
What about the N?
@@Giraffinator Mnemonics that aren't for 100 ...
You should really do a video about intensifiers between languages.
In English, you use "emphatic do" and get "do do" to mean "do (and I'm quite emphatically clear about this point)". In Spanish, you use "sí". In Mandarin, you use a few different ones depending on what mood, aspect, and context you're in ("就", "要", "是", and all the emphatic allofixes like "啊").
Add in "ain't" as an intensifier -- once I learnt that, I had a completely different view of the word. "I'm not going" plain, "I ain't going" emphatic. Don't think it applies to all uses of the term, but it's also useful as just a general "I don't care to conjugate" version, which, hey, so long as the rest is clear, conjugation optional I guess (various languages get away without it): "I ain't goin', you ain't goin', she ain't goin'."
@@Arkylieperhaps even better:
I ain't going to conjugate
I'm not going to conjugate
@@Arkylie I wonder what you think of this: I would see "ain't" in this sense as an example of a _shift of register_ used to intensify. (Except of course where the speaker's dialect regularly uses "ain't" and does not use "am/is/are not": in which case, there is no shift of register to use "ain't." Though in an "ain't" context, a speaker COULD hypothetically get all formal and use "am not"!)
@@maletu I like the idea of shifting register to indicate intensity! It feels like this might tie into the same mental paths that make your brain slow down to read intricate fonts, thus switching to the Analysis Brain (logical analysis) instead of the React Brain (heuristics). Whatever is normal thus lets your brain skim over it, but what is unusual causes your brain to delay and thus can act as an intensifier in this manner.
You've got me thinking!
@@maletu One thing I like about shifting to a more informal register to indicate emphasis is the implied future trajectory; "ask me again and I'm going to swear at you".
It's remarkable how instructive and informative this is despite my comprehending about ten percent of it.
You got to TEN?!
Thank you for taking the time to go through the logic. I have noticed that in e.g. English where the subjunctive forms have largely fallen into disuse or never existed to begin with and ambiguity follows if the sentence is spoken without any stress, we have a trick up our sleeves. We tend to use stress to convey the message anyway. The main problem comes when writing. Then it usually is better to just rewrite to avoid the ambiguity.
My Spanish teacher in high school used to talk about "nuestras pasaportes al mundo del subjuntivo!!" and she'd flap her arms and sorta dance around the room. Like we were flying to another world. It was kinda trippy.
I think you might have made a slip or two. At 15:17 we see the sentence “quizá viene” and you say “it uses the subjunctive in the main clause”, but “viene” is indicative, not subjunctive. Then at 17:17 you speak the words “No crea Usted que es tonto” - which matches your translation of “Don’t think that he is stupid” - but the transcription at the bottom of the screen has “no crea que Usted es tonto”, which would be “Don’t think that you are stupid”. I think maybe a couple of words got transposed.
I’m not a hater! I love the video and the insights you are sharing! If it was - ahem - if it were someone else I wouldn’t bother posting, but I thought you’d want someone to point those things out. I hope I’m not wrong!
I was coming to remark on "quizá viene" too.
Thanks for the note on 15:17 that was confusing me. On 17:17 I'm confused partially by what seems to be a transcription error, and partially by what [it sounds like to me that] he is saying, "Creo" and "Crea" would lead to very different meanings. "No creo "= I don't believe, but "No crea" would mean "Don't [You formal] believe"
Also, shouldn't it be "no cree"? The verb is creer, an ER verb so in present indicative it'd be "cree" whereas "crea" would either be "creates" or the subjunctive for creer.
@@RockiesCanadacrea is correct, because it's in imperative not present indicative
@@davidrios3100 you're right. I missed that Usted is the subject not the object
I started learning Spanish when I was around 30 years old (in 1989, to be precise). I followed language classes and I was taught the same "doubt, hypothesis, uncertainty etc crap" and I soon realized that that would really not work. Then I found, and read, the book "El subjuntivo, Valores y usos" from J.Borrego, J.G. Asencio and E.Prieto. They tackle it using "syntax first, then semantics" and that really corresponds to what you are saying, I think. Also the "Nueva gramática de la lengua española" from the RAE, especially chapter 25, uses the same approach (which is not surprising as J. Borrego, from my book above, is the editor in charge of that chapter. The Nueva gramática is much more detailed than the "el subjuntivo, valores y usos".
First things first: you have to know about the different types of subordinates: "noun subordinate (subordinada sustantiva)", "relative subordinate (subordinada adjetiva)" and "adverbial subordinate (subordinada adverbial)". The indicative/subjunctive semantic opposition works differently for these different types of subordinates.
Then, to make things easier, you also have the conditional sentences. You could classify those in one of the above described types, but it's much easier to treat them separately.
And after you mastered all the above, you come to the quirks. Strange things happen when the principal verb is also in the subjunctive (el efecto bloqueador del subjuntivo) or when it is in the future tense (not documented in the Nueva gramática).
But anyway, your video at least makes it clear that people should at last get rid of that WEIRDO thing. I participated in the Wordreference Spanish forums for more than 10 years, but I have given up because I was sick and tired trying to convince people over and over again that they should tackle the subjunctive in a structured way instead of those semantic only based systems and that includes the Ruiz Campillo "declaración-no declaración" crap.
Very interesting video as always. As a side note, for a French native speaker who also speaks fluent Spanish, one of the hurdles we face in Spanish is the use of the past subjunctive, normal and common in Spanish but that has completely disappeared from modern French, or at least from modern spoken French. Even writers tend to use only the present subjunctive. I’m not sure if it’s the main reason but past subjunctive in French leads to weird sounding and ambiguous verbal forms, among which one of the best known examples is “il aurait fallu que je le susse”…
This is great. I barely know any French or Spanish, but I used to teach subjunctive in English to foreign learners. This is pretty much how I taught it in English (certain structures with subordinate clauses plus certain negative or hypothetical meanings). Listing it by emotions like wishes or dreams doesn't really work too well because you can always encounter a new one, like the phrase "for fear that" which requires subjunctive but isn't a wish or a dream.
I am a native speaker of English with a reasonable education. I’m literate. I’ve been learning Spanish for several years and yes, the subjunctive mood is a challenge. And no, WEIRDO doesn’t help. But I wish you would’ve given your (simpler) explanation in simpler terms. I don’t have a doctorate in linguistics. From the comments here, I can see that much of your audience consists of language nerds. I say that with much respect and even lovingly, but I’m not one of them. I’m just trying to improve my skills. I just want to be able to have meaningful conversations, and seeing the title of your video, I thought it could help.
I am now one step closer to understanding subjunctive...
My mind is scrambled from the overload of information. 😳
You are a literal encyclopedia of language systems. I’m grateful yet even I cannot absorb all this detail. And I usually love details. 😂
@@RosanneLoriMalowany this one was a lot! I tried to keep hammering home the key points: structural triggers, and Unasserted propositions (which come in 1. Negated, 2. Unrealized, and 3. Presupposed)
@@languagejones6784 yes. You’re awesome.
Thank you, for acknowledging both that people have trouble with this feature and why we do. I owe you an apology as well, I had assumed I would leave this video with no better understanding of the subjunctive then I had started with. I had several literal a-ha moments watching this and I feel like if I were to go back to learning French right now (I probably won't) I might actually start making progress with the subjunctive.
Hi Language Jones. Thanks for tackling the subjunctive, it’s a great subject. I’ve been studying Spanish for 5 years and I’ve spent a lot of time on the subjunctive so I paid close attention to your video, took notes and thought about what was said.
I understood that for “presupposed”, that this refers to phrases with 2 clauses, one of which contains background information in order for the speaker to assert something else. You gave this example: “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” “An example in Spanish would be: “Por delicioso que sea, no quiero comerlo”, “As delicious it is, I don’t want to eat it.”
For the examples you gave after the 22:00 minute mark, I’m not sure they are actually “presupposed” statements.
For “We insist the children are treated well,” this seems more like a structural phrase if it’s interpreted as being in the subjunctive, or at least it would be in Spanish, like the “want” phrases you discussed elsewhere in the video. Another way to say it would be “We want you to treat the children well” or in the passive so it’s more like the original phrase, “We want that the children are treated well.” “Querer” and “exigir” both trigger the subjunctive in Spanish. But yes, I agree that the statement’s meaning changes as you mentioned between the indicative and the subjunctive, however technically, it doesn’t seem like a “presupposed” statement.
For “We decided to eat when they arrived,” this is more of a “hasn’t happened / unrealized” statement if it’s interpreted in the subjunctive. It doesn’t feel like either clause is background information so it doesn’t appear to be a “presupposed” statement.
For “I'm going to move to a country where it never snows,” this also seems like a “hasn’t happened / unrealized” statement. It doesn’t feel like either clause is background information.
For “He didn't leave because he was angry” and “I didn't know she was so intelligent”, these didn’t strike me as having subjunctive meanings, at least not in Spanish, as that is the Romance language I’m coming from.
Regarding “He didn't leave because he was angry.” Your interpretations were: “Does this mean he stayed because he was angry? Indicative. Does it mean he left but not out of anger? Subjunctive.” Your interpretations are really just the reverse of each other, i.e. stay vs. left with opposite consequences, and so they don’t fit into the indicative/subjunctive dichotomy. To be a “presupposed” statement it would have to go something like, “As angry as he was, he didn’t leave.”
For “I didn't know she was so intelligent”, the closest translation in Spanish for me would be “No sabía que era tan inteligente.” Negated “saber” doesn’t trigger the subjunctive in Spanish, but perhaps this is not the case in French?
Based on this, it appears that discussing subjunctive in a general way with references to a few Romance languages is really tricky. I’d have loved to see you do separate videos for French and Spanish. The two seem very close, but it appears there’s a fair amount of difference as well.
In any event, thank you for this video. I apologize if I have made any errors myself. Just wanted to share my feedback, my intentions were good. Regards.
It seems generally agreed that either the indicative or the subjuntive can follow "quiza" or "tal vez." So: "Quizá viene" OR "Quizá venga." BUT if you put either at the end, as if your doubt or caveat were an afterthought, you must use the indicative: "Viene, quizá."
"Да" being used to both mark irrealis and as "Yes." is one of my favorite things.
Love this video, lots to say!
First, yes please on mood / modality! That will be fun.
For evidentials, if I remember correctly, in Aymara (Bolivia, Peru, Chile) there is something like reported speech, regular past, and distant past that I could not possibly have seen (sort of "we all know that THING HAPPENED but none of us ACTUALLY SAW IT."
Lastly, I'm excited that you brought veridicality into the subjunctive. My dissertation was on how sentence structure and word semantics (negative looking stuff like "without") create non-veridicality / anti-veridicality and the resulting effects on polarity items (like "anyone"). When I got to the subjunctive in Spanish, I had a gut feel that this is non-veridicality, but your video put a lot more detail and clarity into it, thank you! Related, I suspect that you could collapse your first point, on "wanting" into "irrealis." I mean, I want that you go, but you haven't done it yet, so...maybe? Use of the infinitive when the subject of the main clause and subordinate clause is the same then is just a special case? I wonder how this works in Bulgarian. There is no infinitive, but an infinitive looking thing can act like a subjunctive...I'll have to look into this.
Lastly, with the presupposition piece, I think the subjunctive use here has some sort of a "contrary to expectations" bit. The Shakespeare quote shows this:
“Though she be but little, she is fierce!”
We don't expect little things to be fierce. It would be weird to say "though she be really big, and powerful, and well-armed, she is fierce."
Anyway, thanks again for this. Looking forward to whatever comes next.
For a few laughs, look at Bulgarian. The "official" language, which is an amalgamation of several dialects, has some wackiness where there are forms from one dialect and categories from another dialect that can theoretically be combined in the official language, but because they are sourced from different dialects, no one would eve actually say these things.
😂 You tickled my biologist funny bone, as little things are often fierce in our world. We are usually talking about between species, rather than within a species. However, even within some species we see sex changing (dichogamy) and size morphing occur … fish, amphibians, and reptiles.
New realization unlocked … my perspective of the natural world could trip up my language studies!
I've found, in learning Spanish and Italian, that it's far easier to just get used to where the subjunctive is used by simply consuming a lot of it. Many constructions employing it are common enough.
It also seems that no two languages agree on exactly when the subjunctive is used and when it's not, and there's little rhyme or reason to it. Spanish is hardly logical and systematic on this front (regarding 'creer' and 'pensar', which always require the subjunctive in Italian), yet Italian has its own share of words that all seem to be similar in meaning, yet do not all uniformly trigger the subjunctive. It seems far simpler to simply get used to it over time, seeing as natives make mistakes with those too.
Excellent. Added a lot of context to a method I once stumbled across and have always found very useful - the 'half-overheard conversation'. If you walked into a room and one person was saying to another ' . . . que él puede hacerlo' you would get a different 'gist' of their conversation than if you overheard, ' . . . que él pueda hacerlo'. OK, you wouldn't know what they were talking about, but with the second example you would at least have an idea of 'irrealis' about what was being said. Thinking 'what would someone take from a sentence if they only heard half of it' can help a lot with the indicative/subjunctive choice.
I've long thought it'd be neat to consider what gets left out if the speaker dies (or falls unconscious) mid-sentence. Murder mysteries in English spin on "It was [missing name]" or "She verbed [missing object]"; in Japanese you'd have "She object [missing verb]" or "She object verb [missing tense/negation," though of course the Japanese are good at guessing a lot of content from subtle variations in the earlier part of the sentence. Klingon would have "The ball taken [by] [missing actor(s)]."
Now you've given me the opposite side of the coin, the "didn't hear the first half," and I gotta mull that one over a bit.
In this example the gist I'm getting, both ways, is that it really has to be emphasized that a person of interest is actually male.
What this person said are harder than the Spanish subjunctive itself
Would that there were someone so good at explaining other subjects I'm interested in!
I took AP high school Spanish, but at the same time spent all my social time with Guatemalan immigrants whom I met working as a waiter. The subjunctive intuitively clicked then, and it's even adaptable to places where Spanish classes drew false hard lines.
As a SLA guy, once I got into mood categories (namely realis vs. irrealis), and as a logician, once I learned modal semantics, I never really had to think about triggers.
So, just do all of that, and the subjunctive will come naturally.
How does using modal semantics help determine whether to use the subjunctive?
I’m a formal logic guy, but I don’t really get what’s being said here.
@@marcuskissinger3842 If you're a logic guy, you're going to L-O-V-E love formal natural language semantics.
I just Googled this one: "Eventive modal projection: the case of Spanish subjunctive relative clauses". It starts out with de dicto/de re and only gets better from there.
@@marcuskissinger3842 Human language is a bit squishier than math, and I am a linguist who has used logic, not a logician, so pardon my rough cut at this, but the basic idea is that the indicative is like propositional logic: P or P(x), and you evaluate it in the "real world." In modal logic, as adapted to human language, the diamond is like "may" and the box is like "must," but rather than evaluating it in the "real world," you are evaluating it in "possible worlds." Thus, "John is home" is evaluated in the real world and it is true or false, where "it's possible that John is home" suggests several different worlds and in at least one, he is home, but we can't evaluate in the real world. In the latter, in Spanish, you would use the subjunctive: Es posible, que Juan este a casa" (not "esta a casa," indicative). So, oversimplified bottom line: if you open up a "world" variable with a modal, you would use subjunctive in Spanish, if not, use the indicative.
@@davekaiser7891 There's a fair bit more on the formal semantics side of this, where I found a nice intellectual home, but that is a good example of it applying.
Here's an example from the Bible (Juan 16:7): "Pero yo os digo la verdad: Os es necesario que yo me vaya; porque si yo no me fuese, el Consolador no vendría a vosotros; mas si me fuere, os lo enviaré." Many of the modalities above are for necessity, as well.
@@marcuskissinger3842 My original response never appeared (thanks, YT), but I gave an example to illustrate what's up with the other respondent.
This is a long video, I'll watch it later when I have more time. Thank you for making it and I'm looking forward to it.
PLEASE DO MODAL VERBS!! I am a new English teacher and want a better way to conceptualize them! Also, I would love if you did a whole video on just French subjunctive, more examples in French would be amazing!
Wow! What exactly about this is less complicated than other explanations? It is mindblowingingly complex. Things started to make a tiny bit more sense to me at 22:20 when you talk about the difference between the indicative and the subjunctive and how a sentence can have ambiguous meaning (in English) depending on which is at play. Everything before this was just noise to me LOL! I am going to take the examples you give in English and ask my Spanish teacher to help me understand how to express them in the indicative and in the subjunctive in Spanish. I can see why people give up at this point in the process! I feel like going up!! Thanks though for a very thought-provoking lesson. I now have a headache...
My suggestion: 1. know that it exists and roughly used for things that are not litteral descriptions. 2. get enough exposure in the target language that it becomes intuitive, without trying to find "the logic" that explains every use case.
The problem with all these "analytical" approaches trying to find a universal rule is that the usage is already different across the various romance languages. How could there be a universal ground truth if the languages don't agree between each other.
@@broccoli9308 Thanks! That is good advice. I talked with my Spanish teacher about it and he suggested that I start by learning only two or three examples and practice changing up the sentences. From what I can tell, the conjugation of the subjunctive is no more difficult than any other tense. It is knowing when and how to use it that is challenging. I read and listen every day in Spanish. I think a first important step is being to to identify when the subjunctive is being used.
(I'm not a professional linguist, just sharing something that might help)
The general concept of the subjunctive is that it is communicating something that doesn't occur in reality but presumptively could.
Example sentence:
Quiero que vayamos a la tienda.
"I want that we go to the store"
"We" isn't in fact going to the store, it is something desired by the subject in the dependant clause (i.e the part before que/that). Something desired is not something occuring definitively in reality, so the indicative mood isn't used as it asserts or states fact. That's the gist of it.
The English ambiguity you refer to gives us that common speech pattern in which we restate the same sentence with exaggerated emphasis. “No no, he DIDN’T leave because he WAS angry.”
English ambiguity -- "I like dogs more than most people."
Your explanation of the subjunctive explains what the subjunctive is very well, but I don't know if it helps language learners much more than the typical WEIRDO acronym, which to me at least seems simpler and while not explanatory, covers most of the use cases.
At least for me, its easier to identify verbs associated with doubt or wishes than think about presupposition.
@@max_pinnative speakers don't need to use lists to master subjunctive, they acquire it natively
@@max_pin Not just knowing the verbs, I think native speakers have a deep, possibly subconscious understanding of its meaning, since there are situations where it is optional depending on what is meant. That's where I think this video is helpful: it provides the understanding part, so that when you do trigger it you can start to get that intuitive understanding and refine your perception of the shades of meaning implied by using or not using the subjunctive. You still have to learn the triggering verbs at least to some extent, especially since there are exceptions (e.g. to hope in French doesn't take the subjunctive, whereas in Spanish it does) but in my experience that is not enough.
That is true. Even though I'm a native speaker of two subjunctive-laden languages, the uses of this form in other languages don't align 100%, and learning others via recognizing triggering environments is I think the best way to start.
Now I will say, it is true that you "get" it after a while, in the sense that at some point you start guessing which new verbs will have it -- and the deeper you get into the "feeling" of irrealis the video was talking about, the more often your guesses will be correct. At some point, it will feel like it's pure semantics -- it's "what you want to say."
@@max_pin No anglophone, they naturally aquire that growing up with a language, they don't need to think about which verb triggers it, it comes naturally to them. I will also add that some verbs can take both the subjunctive and indicative which can change the meaning of the sentence. The subjunctive can also be used by itself without a verb triggering it if the sentence it is in isn't stating something occuring in reality. It's useful to know which verbs trigger the subjunctive, but you won't get the full idea of it's function and what it's trying to communicate that way.
Maybe a little meta, but when you said, "we want that someone does something," I unironically, instinctively thought that I'd have said, "we want that someone DO something."
Nice video! Now I can finally remember without doubt (!) when to use “cuando” with subjunctive (= as soon as) and when to use it with indicative mood (= every time when).
However, at 21:48 you address my biggest problem with subjunctive mood: Romance languages have conditionals, too. As a native (or born and raised, if you prefer) German speaker, I have only a marginal grasp of the difference. We use our Konjunktiv for both. A friend of mine, born and raised French-speaking, translates company websites from German to French - and even that friend often is not sure when to use the conditionnel in a subordinate clause. So, I’d really like a video on that difference.
I wish I could say this made the subjunctive easier -- at least as the thumbnail promised.
Too many side comments, qualifiers, and an allegiance to other people's jargon. Or perhaps I'm not the intended audience, to far outside the discourse community.
I kept feeling like I got suckered into that "One Little Trick" videos.
HAIL, CAESAR!
I've been waiting for this video ever since you announced it last week!🎉🎉🎉
Yes for a video on the modality systems!
Plus, a vote for one video on the conditional and one on the optative!
Totally sending this channel to my son (who is applying to uni rn, and this is in his wheel house.)
I love the "You want that I should…" phrasing is drawn directly from the native language that the ESL speaker originally spoke. We can learn so much from the mistakes of our neighbors who chose us.
Interesting video. I quite enjoyed that. When I first studied Spanish in junior high and high school, they taught the subjunctive WAY worse than what you described unhelpful methods to be. It was clear that the (non-native) teachers didn't know it much better than we did. When I really learned Spanish (well, kind of - it was in Mexico, hahaha), my friends mercilessly made fun of me for my complete lack of understanding of this form. If you are familiar with Mexicans in Mexico, you'd know that they meant no offense by this; it was just funny to them (I got a lot of razzing over por and para, and ser and estar as well, and so on and on). It didn't help any that my friends and I were usually stoned, too. But some of them had a clear enough understanding to help me with it a little bit, and I finally kinda got a feel for it without a complete understanding of it (much like my use of por and para, or my use of 了 in Mandarin, or indeed my brother's understanding of English subjunctive, gerunds/infinitives, etc.). But you actually explained it here in a way that I could really have used 20 years ago, hahaha. Still, thanks. I enjoyed the video.
5:12 - Ojalá (emphasis on the last syllable). Just an observation 😅.
It's a hispanification of inshallah
@@jeroenwarner4834 yes indeed
Thank you very much for the reasons we use the subjunctive! I acquired the subjunctive with the rest of the language when I was living abroad and really didn't understand all the reasons why. I really appreciate knowing . . .
I was so hopeful that I would feel more comfortable with the subjunctive after this. Probably me, but I just got lost in all the asides and intricacies. I'm afraid I'll just have to learn the subjunctive the way native speakers do: Enough exposure that you just know what sounds right and what doesn't. That is why being exposed to native speakers who use correct grammar and vocabulary is so important. Let's face it. If you have to apply rules to decide what to say in real time, you'll never speak the language comfortably, neither for yourself and nor for those trying to converse with you.
I immigrated to Spain (from Israel) 6 years ago and started my Spanish learning journey here. I personally love the subjunctive! I think it’s a really cool means of expression 🤓
It helped me to realize that we have many similar phrases and expressions in Hebrew, but that in Hebrew we just don’t have a separate tense or mood for them. We just use the future tense, but in a lot of ways it’s essentially the same.
How timely! I'm in a Spanish school and have been studying present subjunctive for the past 2 weeks, and will be spending the next 3 weeks on imperfect subjunctive. I'll have to watch this again in a few weeks. Thanks!
Espero que te vaya bien y que tengas mucha suerte con eso. Ojalá que hayas disfrutado el subjuntivo presente y podrás aprender el subjuntivo imperfecto.
I live in a french speaking country and learnt french by speaking mostly so my subjuctive use was genuinely just based on vibes...thanks for finally explaining what my french speaking teachers themselves didn't explain that well
I appreciate the video, I've been learning French on and off for a few years and picked up Spanish not long ago, and I've learned to sometimes use the Subjuntive because that's just how you say certain phrases, I admit I won't be thinking about this when I construct sentences going forward, but I will remember it whenever I learn new phrases to commit to memory.
It'll help a lot actually understanding the nuance of what the difference is supposed to be.
I'm a (sort of) native Spanish speaker born and raised in a Latin-American household, and this gave me a lot to think about. I feel like I often hear family members using the subjunctive in places where I wouldn't expect it right away, almost like a form of "flavoring" or "shading." This is probably the most principled, yet intuitive explanation I've heard yet of what's exactly going on there. Thank you!
Wow this is so awesome! I've been thinking about going into linguistics because of my interest in learning language. I'm a spanish major but thought about moving towards linguistics. But people telling me it's less about learning language and more about the mechanics of them, I thought I'd be waisting my time.
Thank you for both a great explainer in a relatively short amount of time of something that I never got proper lessons on, and a great community in the comments offering different native views and nuances from various languages to add to what you said.
You are doing a good job of showing why / how linguistics is an interesting field. I don't know if that is in any way your intent, but the content is having that effect.
Well you've made this tense more more easier for me to grasp, I also love the additional layers of meaning it can add.
Thank you Dr. Taylor "Language" Jones, just sent this to my buddies who still get tripped up by the subjunctive. Considering sending it to my HS Spanish and French teachers as well because this is more comprehensive and in-depth than anything I was ever taught
This is excellent thank-you. I was beginning to form my own ideas about when to use the subjunctive and this video gave me the language to properly express my ideas. The structural structures were fairly easy to spot with enough exposure to the language (and contrary to most definitions I had had until this video); the major break-through was the idea of "irrealis" - as soon as you defined it, everything fell into place. The examples at the end, contrasting ambiguous English with the clarity of the subjunctive was the icing on the cake.
I finally decided to sit through more then ~30 seconds of one of your videos, (short-form has given me terrible attention span), and it was totally worth it!
You explained everything really well in an easy to understand way, and it was also much deeper the I probably would have gleaned from a short google search.
I am learning Latin right now, so this should be helpful.
Love your videos, every one of them
They give me inspiration as I work towards a linguistics degree
As a native French speaker (which is shorthand to mean it's the language I have been using in day-to-day life for all my life, leave me alone), I do feel like the subjunctive in French, more specifically informal French, is a lot weirder (ha) than this. It seems to me that it has eroded (probably due to the fact it's indistinguishable from the indicative in singular conjugations of 1st group verbs, and in the 3rd person plural in almost all verbs), and that the indicative may be used where the subjunctive used to be used. Notably, for example, in negation, where I don't feel like "Je pense pas que c'est" is incorrect in informal speech (though it definitely is in the standard). I'm also fairly certain not many people would actually say "Je cherche quelqu'un qui sache jouer de la guitare"; in fact, I wonder if the conditional ("Je cherche quelqu'un qui saurait jouer de la guitare") might be more common for this case, at this point.
As for the examples at the end, most of them probably wouldn't use the subjunctive in French. Let me review them one by one.
"We insist the children are treated well." -> Distinguished with subjunctive. "Nous insistons que les enfants sont bien traités." vs "Nous insistons que les enfants soient bien traités."
"We decided to eat when they arrived." -> Distinguished, but I'd say more with the conditional than the subjunctive. "Nous avons décidé de manger une fois qu'ils sont arrivés." vs "Nous avons décidé de manger une fois qu'ils seraient/soient arrivés."
"I'm gonna move to a country where it never snows." -> The distinction between indicative and subjunctive does not even exist (1st group verb, singular). "Je vais déménager dans un pays où il ne neige jamais."
Ok, to be fair, we could replace the verb and say something like "Je vais déménager dans un pays où il n'y a jamais de neige". But even then, I don't think we would make a distinction. If we were to use either the subjunctive or the conditional, that would imply, like for the guitar example, that we don't know if there is one (like, one available, or one in the area, for the guitar example). But we DO know there are countries without snow, so there's no uncertainty, therefore indicative. I also think that the use of "où" rather than "que" heavily discourages the subjunctive. The use of the conditional would also be interpreted differently: "Je vais déménager dans un pays où il n'y aurait jamais de neige" could indicate something more like "in that country, there wouldn't be snow for me to endure". Which doesn't make it very different in meaning compared to the present indicative.
"He didn't leave because he was angry." -> That's another weird one. "Il n'est pas parti parce qu'il était en colère" can mean either, but you COULD specify the latter meaning by using the conditional. "Il n'est pas parti parce qu'il aurait été en colère". But it creates a different ambiguity, because it can also mean that he would have been angry if he left. In any case, the subjunctive feels odd here, at least to me. I think the distinction would be better expressed saying something like "Il est resté parce qu'il était en colère" vs "Il est parti, mais pas parce qu'il était en colère". If we are using the original sentence, then the context is probably enough to specify which meaning we mean. Maybe by adding the actual reason in the second case, like "Il n'est pas parti parce qu'il était en colère, mais parce que..."
"I didn't know she was so intelligent." I might be wrong here, but... Isn't this example weird even in English? I don't know that there is ambiguity in this one. I'm pretty sure for the second meaning, one would say something more like "I didn't think she was that intelligent." Again, I might be wrong, feel free to correct.
In any case, in French, we would say "Je ne savais pas qu'elle était aussi intelligente." vs "Je ne trouvais pas qu'elle était si intelligente (que ça)." Heck, we might use the passé composé for the latter, even: "Je n'ai pas trouvé qu'elle était si intelligente (que ça)". No subjunctive involved.
I'm a bit sad, because I struggle to explain the subjunctive to people, and I was hoping this video would help, and while it does kind of help bringing together some ideas that were once separate, it also doesn't really help with the much weirder side of French subjunctive, especially in informal speech, and that's usually the part that I think is most confusing to people.
Awesome video! Thanks!
Just like everyone else said, the content is great, with good explanations & examples. But what I like most is the smooth and entertaining you present. All those little jokes with the subtle &/or quick flashes of text or images, plus exactly the right amount of self-depricating digs. I could watch this guy for days. Thanks heaps. Keep up the good work!
I loved this video, very informative as always. For me, as a native Brazilian Portuguese speaker, the problem arises when we use the subjunctive differently in other Romance languages. For instance, I have the impression that we use the subjunctive in a much more relaxed way than French, in both directions. We also have something unique to Iberian languages, the future subjunctive, which we kind of invented and didn't exist in Latin, so... So there you have it. I've been living in France for ten years now, and I still make mistakes when it comes to subjunctive sentences, because the usage isn't the same... 🤣
I really appreciate this! I love hearing the logic and structure of language explained. It's the whole "fish doesn't know what water is" analogy: it's hard to think about these structures because we "breathe" them constantly. Thank you, and, yes, please more of this. Modality sounds like a great topic.
Side note: I had to google the Ralph Fiennes movie ("Hail, Caesar!" 2016). I'd never heard of it before, but I love the Coen brothers, and I'm definitely going to check it out!
When my twin daughters were 4 we were playing a game and choosing coloured pieces and daughter R asked me “is it ok if F be’s yellow?” If she was simply asserting she totally would have just said ‘F is yellow’. I thought it was a lovely example of how there is an instinctive semantic distinction that the subjunctive expresses, even when we’re young.
I not that interested in linguistics as a subject, and I'm not sure I could even have defined subjunctive, but this made perfect sense. Great explanation!
I’m a native English speaker from Canada. I studied Spanish literature and history in Madrid and I understand the use of the subjunctive when I read it but struggle to explain it in English. And that what was many years ago and my skills have become rusty. This video was a good refresher. Thank you!
Interesting! I also have a Ph.D. in linguistics from Rice University in Houston, Texas, and I also like to learn languages just as much as dissecting them (nothing wrong with some good ol' linguistic analysis -- where would we be without hyphens, square brackets, and tree diagrams -- but hey, speaking those languages is also cool!). (Have you read Wolfgang Klein's little book on aspect and tense as parts of one and the same variable? It might change some of the introduction of your video.)
I only have one disagreement with what you say here (and I'll expound on it below; like a good linguist, I love to make my comments look like articles being made ready for publication...): the subjunctive is indeed a reflection of irrealis, but this has been changing through time, and it's been becoming more and more like the W.E.I.R.D.O. table makes it look like: a triggered, knee-jerk reaction to a certain syntactic environment. It's not there yet (by far!), but the writing is on the wall.
So, let's play! 🙂
As a native speaker of Portuguese and Spanish, I never really had to fight with the subjunctive; it just 'made sense' to me. But as I saw others struggling with it in their attempt to learn Romance languages, I began to question my own knowledge. How do I 'know' that "eu gostaria" HAS TO BE followed by a subjunctive "que ele VIESSE" (= I'd like him to come)? (And Portuguese is hardcore enough to have even a subjunctive future, besides having an inflectible infinitive...).
When I look at my own usage of English vs. Spanish/Portuguese, what strikes me is that the latter languages have different ways of dealing with irreality, with 'non-declarativity'. As I speak, I realize something I'm saying is not really a claim -- I'm not saying anything about reality, I'm talking about a 'dreamworld' of wishes, desires, presuppositions, hypotheses, counterfactuals, projections, conjectures, etc. that relates to reality in that it will influence my actions in the real world (if 'I want Helen to go to the restaurant with me', I'm probably going to stand up and go talk to Helen), but are not themselves actions in the real world. When I speak Portuguese or Spanish, I'm more acutely aware of that: this is not a claim, I should show that in my grammar, typically (though not always) by using the subjunctive, because, if I don't, I'll mislead the hearer into thinking this is a claim about reality. English doesn't do that, though there are still little remnants here and there of a time when it did ("If I WERE you..."). TL;DR -- I don't think it's ever about "structure" (same subject or not, subordinate clause or not) as it is about what I want the hearer to think. Even in the cases in which you say the real question is whether or not the subject is the same in main and subordinate clauses ("I want to go", "I want you to go"), there is no structural reason why the subjunctive should be the TAM form used in the subordinate clause. It could perfectly well be the indicative -- if it weren't (
Very funny video, Herr Doktor Language Jones.😂. And a few hidden pearls to find here, too! I won't say, like the Queen of Hearts, "¡que le corten la cabeza!"
Your point on "presupposed information" also shows up in phrases like "el hecho de que sea así..." (vs. el hecho de que es así...")
I've been studying Latin for YEARS and this was always the wall I bumped up against. Very fitting that you used a clip from Hail Caesar!!
Underrated movie! And I feel you. Especially when it's subjunctive in the main clause.
Oh wow, this is so helpful and clear! I believe I'm three and a half units from finishing the Duolingo French course, and I took classes in middle school, high school, and college, but I still trip over subjunctive so frequently.
Great video! It's nice to know the why behind it instead of just memorizing when it should be used
WOW, I think I need to listen a couple of more times. Perhaps I avoid problems as a Chinese linguist. I hope there is a future video on aspect.
During my short time that I studied Spanish, I was under the impression that certain stock phrases people used were always in the subjunctive.
"We insist that the children BE treated well." (If a wish or demand, not an assertion of fact.) I see no point in stripping the poor rags of subjunctive that English may still retain...
Couple of years ago, frustrated by the myriad not-fitting-together schemata of how to use the subjunctive in Spanish, I conflated a couple of the more promising ones, and started collecting example sentences (from my reading: mostly translations of old s/sf novels I read in adolescence: but being choosy about translators) AND THEN TRYING TO FURTHER REARRANGE AND SIMPLIFY MY SCHEMA in light of those sentences. Messed with this, off and on, for about 6 months-though I could not interest any iTalki tutor in looking at the project. Then life intervened. But now your video is making me want to go back and see how your schema corresponds/doesn't correspond to what I was doing, and ponder. Thank you!
That was also my immediate reaction to his example with "insist." His example sentence sounded very unnatural, because I don't believe I ever use "insist" in an assertive sense. I use it for a demand, but then I always use the subjunctive.
@@jhfenton Interesting. I do use "insist" in the other sense-and I insist that it is also correct. (Being pedantic and stubborn, it comes naturally to me to insist on the truth or falsehood of many things.) Moreover, people commonly demand-insist that their desired outcome is accomplished. That is becoming correct, or correct-ish, as English looses its subjunctive. BUT the subjunctive form-and without a modal word, at that!-is still reasonably common in a construction like this. Also legal use: to direct that the money BE paid into an escrow fund, or some such.
@@jhfenton Probably because when we could say insist as a method of clearing up doubt, we instead say "promise" or "assure", as in "I assure you that the children are treated well." Probably because it's hard to differentiate between insist as a demand and as an assertion.
Of course we avoid it while retaining the meaning by saying "treat the children well"
Honestly it's a better sentence bc why say "I insist" when your can just, you know, INSIST.
Reminds me of "I should like to say you are pretty" (don't tell me you want to say it, just say it: "you're pretty")
"I think that xyz."
How about just say "xyz"? Obviously if you're saying it, you think it!
@@TheoMurpse As to the latter, there's a difference. "I think X" is a qualification, "X" is just an absolute. They're not the same. I suspect similar shades apply to your other examples.
As it happens, I actually own a copy of the first edition of Mood and Modality, which I bought back around 1990 for $14.95 (~$36 in today's dollars), but I see that the second edition is currently selling for $72 on Amazon. So, never cheap, and getting dramatically more expensive by the decade. Anyway, well worth reading, but pretty dense, so don't expect to breeze through it casually and then suddenly use the Spanish subjunctive correctly and fluently. It's theory, and it will explain a lot of things that might otherwise be mystifying, but you will still need to see lots of practical examples, and practice using them, just like any other feature of the language you are studying. Still, it's a better explanation than what you might normally see in a traditional classroom - always assuming that you have both the cash to buy the book and the sheer patience to wade through it all.
I think I finally get what my teacher in high school tried to get across 40 years ago... It definitely made it a lot clearer.
Thanks so much for making this! Really helps clarify things that have confused me in studying French. By all means, make the videos you tease at the end - I'll watch 'em all!
In London the subjunctive 'be' has become something of a relic in all codes but it's still understood through the study of Shakespeare and Dickens etc. Because of this, I think we can still use the English subjunctive to help explain the use of the subjunctive, its effects and its power in other languages.
great video. I took a break from memorizing all the verb forms of the most common Spanish verbs to embark on a project to visually read all 7 volumes of Harry Potter in Spanish while at the same time listening to the respective Spanish language Audiobook. Am 35% through volume 6. This video made me fondly think of all the Spanish grammar I learned in the past and now only vaguely remember.
Dude. Thank you so much for this video. You’ve helped clarify so much!!
After watching this and beginning to finally grasp the subjunctive (thank you Dr. Jones!) I came across this example in English from 100 years ago by the poet Charlotte Mew that illustrates Taylor's point quite well, and how we've got rid of it. It's in dialect and deliberately uses the wrong pronoun but I think the subjunctive use is correct. The Farmer's Bride of the poem has run away and the villagers are speculating about her location:
"Out 'mong the sheep, her be," they said
We would now say something like "I bet (that) she's out with the sheep" to express the doubt or "She's out with the sheep" if we know that she's there or wish to be ambiguous. If we retained the subjunctive we would say either "She is out with the sheep" (I saw her) or "She be out with the sheep" (I'm guessing) to disambiguate.
I've always struggled with this in French and was dreading it when approaching it in Spanish. I assumed I'd have to learn all the examples. Now I will just embrace it.
Fun Fact: Did you know that the motto of the Order of the Garter, "Honi soit qui mal y pense" and included in the coat of arms of the British Royal Family, uses the subjunctive? "Shamed be whoever thinks badly of it"
The place to start with subjunctive is to show English speakers that they use it all the goddamn time. They just don't realize it, because they think they're using indicative past tense, future tense, or present tense. Once they understand that they are already masters of subjunctive, that makes it far far easier to teach.
If I were you, that is what I would stress.
See, right there, two present tense subjunctive clauses that most English speakers would tag as "past tense" and "future tense". And to be sure, the FORMS look like past tense and future tense, which feels proper since there is a cause followed by an effect. But nope, it's all present tense subjunctive.
Then there's the "long live the king" / "thy kingdom come" / "I move that he be expelled" type of subjunctive. Again, when you're aware that you use it in English without even thinking, you'll have a sense of when to use it in other languages.
You mentioned that German sort of has subjunctive; what German has is IDENTICAL to English subjunctive, but for two small differences:
1) They call it "Konjunktiv".
2) They are good enough to slap an umlaut on the vowel in the verb and/or tweak the inflection so you have an explicit cue that it's Konjunktiv.
German is also more likely to use subjunctive in the "doubt" sense than English ("she said she be 18 years old"), but from what I hear they're starting to drift away from that too, like English has.
I think a lot of language teachers only focus on concept #1, the structural triggers, which makes it much harder to understand what the subjunctive is actually communicating in other contexts. It’s easy for a French teacher to say “if x,y, or z then subjunctive and you’ll be right 90% of the time” than it is to explain cases in which the subjunctive is actually used to communicate different meanings. And starting with this just makes the subjunctive feel like an arbitrary grammatical rule.
I feel like when teaching to a language learner, it’d make more sense to start with concept #2 to show the nuances that the subjunctive can be used to communicate. Then learning the structures in concept #1 would be more straightforward, if you’ve already conceptually learned what the subjunctive is used for, then you can learn how else it can come up without wondering how the hell it’s supposed to be useful. The French examples in concept #2 helped me a lot.
This is an excellent video on the topic - and I think nobody else talks about this because nobody else actually understands the subjunctive, certainly not to the extent you explain it here.
Fun fact: some languages use the subjunctive even for "I want to go", typically because they don't have an infinitive. See Greek, Romanian (though it does have an infinitive), Tosk Albanian. Gheg Albanian is the other extreme, using the infinitive even where the subjects of the two clauses are different.
Also, Romanian is the odd one out again amongst the Romance languages, having only minimally different verb forms for the subjunctive (aside from the copula).
Hmmm..."were I a rich man, I should go to the fancy store" activates subjunctive for oneself in english, too. (No?)
@@hundertzwoelf I don't speak Romanian but the feeling I get from trying to read it is "this is 5th-century Latin somewhat simplified for Magyar- and Slavic-speaking learners." (Magyar grammar is lightyears away from Latin)
Coming from a long-time Spanish learner, that was some good breakdown. I'm currently trying to pick up Georgian and I kept thinking how great it would be had you gone into the optative, as to my amateur eye it seems to largely overlap in functionality with Romance subjunctives, just under a different name. Though that's probably way too in the weeds and specific for most viewers.
Wow. I never had WEIRDO shoved down my throat, but for sure my Spanish teachers have focused almost exclusively on triggers and use cases. It’s so much easier - and more accurate - to present it this way. !Muchísimas gracias, parcero!
Absolutely brilliant. I now finally understand. It’s so much easier to learn and remember when language structure is logical. 😊
Great video. Very useful. I'd be happy to see a video on modal systems too, and anything related to these topics, this is fascinating
I'm gonna recommend this video to everyone who's learning a language, cuz this entire video is gold. I finally feel like i understand just what the hell the subjunctive is! Thank you!
Loved it! (And I was waiting and waiting for the French example that finally came near the end (my own fave: Je cherche un homme qui est grand et beau/Je cherche un homme qui soit grand et beau) Please keep making videos like this.
Thank you so much! This one was a lot more wonky, and I was afraid I'd lose people. If I do it right with this channel, I feel that I might be teaching people something useful, but that they didn't know they wanted. TH-cam consistently encourages me, strongly, to just make videos like "can you learn two languages at once" (which I did, and it did well) but I think that people just don't know to ask what they don't know to ask. Getting it to them in a way that's interesting, though, is really hard, so I appreciate that you liked the video!
@@languagejones6784 I taught languages for 28 years and modestly dare to say I'm a "polyglot" (CI French/ B2 German and Russian) I did barely any linguistics at university and I love how you make difficult concepts easier to grasp - that is the mark of a Good Teacher.
This video came at a perfect moment for me, as I am about to tackle subjuntive in Portuguese. I couldnt help but notice some parallels between how you described subjunctive to how we use conditional in Polish (my primary) and now I know that for the forseeable future I'll be confusing subjunctive and conditional in Portuguese.
Native Portuguese speaker here. Note that there are conditional tenses in Portuguese as well, but they're called "subjunctive" (because the conditional uses of the Portuguese subjunctive go beyond conditional); there is a tense traditionally called "future of preterite" that I wished were called "future subjunctive" because it's really what it is, but... A way I used when I was trying to learn Polish is to consider the "ł-by"-conditionals (like Russian "бы") as having more restricted uses: they only occur in hypothetical contexts ("If I were a king..."), whereas the Portuguese subjunctive occurs in more contexts. Let's say you consider hypothetical uses like "Czytałbym książkę" = "eu leria o livro" as a "beginning" and then just said, but in Portuguese there are various subjunctive conjugations, and they have more uses than the Polish conditional. Maybe that will help?
I hope it does! 🙂
Intreresting video, well structured, explained and presented. Liked and subscribed.
22:16 Spanish makes the same distinction but with an extra detail: "Busco _a_ alguien que _toca_ guitarra" vs "Busco alguien que _toque_ guitarra". With the subjunctive, the person is non-specific, so the personal direct object marker _a_ is not required.
Whether *"Busco a alguien que toque guitarra" is grammatical, I don't know. To my non-native ear, it seems like it could mean "I'm trying to find a specific person in order to get them to play the guitar" (i.e. _para que_ toque) but that's pretty contrived. Can a native speaker comment?