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For 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.
by MereInterest 8y ago
For 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.