Saturday, March 12, 2016

Hello!
This week I finally finished comparing the subjunctive mood for each of the languages. So, without further ado, the winner, with six points out of a possible eight, is Spanish! French, Portuguese, and Italian all tied for second place with five out of eight points. I did my comparisons a little differently for the subjunctive than I did for the indicatives though. Instead of scoring each person and number in each case, I just scored each case as a whole. So, every tense was worth two points, and they were scored based on whether or not they had a recognizable vowel change and if the tense endings in the subjunctive mood were similar to the ending in the indicative mood.
Here is an example: the present subjunctive for Spanish got the full two points. Here's why, there is a clear vowel shift for each verb ending; -ar verbs drop the a and get an e, and -er and -ir verbs drop their vowels for an a. On top of that, the endings are still the same; second person singular verbs end with an s in the indicative and in the subjunctive. This makes it easy to know what tense the subjunctive is.
Spanish Present active indicative
Singular -ar -er -ir Plural -ar -er -ir
1st o e o 1st amos emos imos
2nd as es es 2nd àis èis is
3rd a e e 3rd an en en


Spanish Subjunctive
Present -ar -er -ir
1st Singular e a a
2nd Singular es as as
3rd Singular e a a
1st Plural emos amos amos
2nd Plural éis áis áis
3rd Plural en an an


One thing that I found interesting while making my comparison was that Portuguese has a future subjunctive. I know, right? It is the only romance language that uses a future subjunctive, and it is used for "if", "when", or "as soon as." The future tense obviously did not get any points because there is no way I would even think to use a future subjunctive just from knowing Latin.
Anyway, next week I will be working on comparing participles and imperatives, and then I will be done with the grammar comparisons!

1 comment:

  1. Future subjunctive??!?!?!?!? Whaaaat? That's so cool! Now I need to learn Portuguese.

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