Friday, March 4, 2016

Hello again!
This past week I have been working on comparing the subjunctive mood for the Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French and Latin languages. It has been a little tricky, it's not as straight forward as comparing the indicatives. I am still in the midst of making the comparisons, so I don't have the results yet. But here is what I have been working on so far. Each language has a present, perfect, imperfect, and pluperfect subjunctive. The subjunctive is marked by a vowel change, and even though the changes might not be the same in one language as they are in Latin, I think that they are still fairly recognizable because either the ending vowel or a vowel in the stem would be different and stand out.
Here is an example of what I am talking about:
In Latin, the vowel changes depending on what degree of conjugation the verb is; either first -are, second -ēre, third -ere, or fourth -ire. So with the first conjugation verb amare, to love, the a would change to an e and the present tense endings would be added onto the end to show what person it's in. So to make "She loves," into a present subjunctive and get "let her love," you would change amat to amet. For second conjugation verbs, the e changes to an ea, for third conjugation verbs, the e changes to an a, and for fourth conjugation verbs the i changes to an ia. 
In Spanish, the verb for love in encantar, to say "she loves," you would add the present third person singular ending and get encanta, and to make it a present subjunctive you change the a to an e and get encante. If I know that the verb is an -ar verb in Spanish, then seeing it end with an e instead of an a would be a red flag for me, and I would know that something is up, and hopefully be able to draw the conclusion that it is a subjunctive.
So that's what I am working on and I hope to get the results for you by next week!

1 comment:

  1. How many different tenses are you going to compare over all?

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