Here is why the subjunctive verb went out of fashion
Samia-Lugwe English dictionary on display on February 27, 2014. To conjugate is to inflect a verb according to the number, tense and gender of the noun or pronoun controlling them. FILE PHOTO
What you need to know:
- That conveys two facts. Any language which — like French — today insists on the subjunctive merely expresses its attachment to primitivism.
In this column, I have written about the subjunctive verb about a million times before.
Yet, although English is our official language of instruction, of governance and of “higher” echelons of work, the products of Kenya’s schools and universities never seem even to have heard of the word subjunctive.
As a verb form — probably peculiar to the Indo-European languages — it is used mainly to convey a doubt.
No, the subjunctive is not a real tense. It is merely the verb form by which the speaker or writer conveys the message that he or she is not quite certain that his or her verbal message is wholly true or passable.
The subjunctive is only one of what the grammarians call “moods”.
It expresses only the utterer’s “feeling” of hope that what he or she is uttering will pass muster as a truth.
Indeed, in the Indo-European languages — which extend all the way from Bangladesh and northern India to Ireland (and, nowadays, beyond the Atlantic Sea to North America) — the subjunctive is an extremely primitive verb form.
That conveys two facts. Any language which — like French — today insists on the subjunctive merely expresses its attachment to primitivism.
That is what critics refer to whenever they pose the question: “Parlez-vous Franglais? (Do you speak Frenglish?), by which they seem to be criticising the insistence on these primitive forms by certain custodians of the French language, especially in far-removed Quebec.
That is why, among Europe’s three national tongues of which I have at least a smattering (namely, English, French and German), English — the most highly developed of them all — has long ago dropped certain primitivisms, including the subjunctive, almost wholly as a verb form.
But there are relics (especially in religious texts) and, whenever you use them, you must ensure that the form is correct.
CONDITIONAL ACTION
To reiterate, Collins defines the adjective subjunctive as denoting or describing the mood of the verb used whenever the content of the whole clause is doubtful or whenever its truth is merely supposed — whenever the verb used is a mere proposition and, therefore, because it is not a real tense, is not a conjugation.
To conjugate is to inflect (namely, to give various forms to) a verb according to the number (singular or plural), tense (past, present or future) and gender (masculine, feminine or neuter) of the noun or pronoun controlling them — though, as a form, the neuter seems to be moribund.
Whenever a Frenchman or woman announces: “Il faut que j’aille” (“I must go” or, more literally, “it is necessary that I go”), aille (pronounced like the English word “eye”) is the subjunctive form of the infinitive aller (“to go”) as taken by the first person singular subject.
The verb is thus subjunctive because it expresses only a conditional action, not a real one.
In other genders, numbers and tenses, the infinitive form aller (“to go”) takes corresponding other forms which the learner must fully muster if he or she is to communicate effectively with other French speakers.
