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English has the subjunctive mood as well, though it is phasing out of use. If you were to express a hypothetical, you would use "were" as the subjunctive tense
by MereInterest 8y ago
English has the subjunctive mood as well, though it is phasing out of use. If you were to express a hypothetical, you would use "were" as the subjunctive tense. For example, the song title "If I were a rich man" rather than "If I was a rich man", or the previous sentence in this post.
- opportune 8y agoyes, I had just realized that and added it as an edit. I'm pretty sure you can ignore the subjunctive and still have it be correct, i.e. I don't think there is anything grammatically wrong with saying "If I was rich", at least in the sense that it wouldn't be picked up on in casual speech
- MereInterest 8y agoFor the most part, yes. Though, if you flip the word order, it immediately sounds off. "Were I a rich man, I wouldn't have to work hard." sounds reasonable. "Was I a rich man, I wouldn't have to work hard." sounds rather jarring.
- zerb 8y agoIt seems there's a general trend in the development of English to remove tenses and moods in favor of instead more-strictly prescribing word order. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language
- dorchadas 8y agoYep, and in a lot of other Indo-European languages as well. However, it's not a constant trend across languages as Finnish and Estonian both have more cases than their ancestor language did. It's likely that English will circle back around and start becoming less analytic as time goes on due to various things such as grammaticalization.