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