Learn About The Subjunctive Mood in The Indo-European Languages

The reconstructed Proto Indo-European language is the hypothetical parent of many language families. These include Germanic languages (including English), Latinate Romance languages, Slavic languages and several others. It has two closely related moods: the subjunctive and the operative. Many of its daughter languages combined or confounded these moods.

In Indo-European, the subjunctive was formed by using the full ablaut grade of the root of the verb, and adding the thematic vowel *-e- or *-o-
to the root stem, with the full, primary set of personal inflections. The subjunctive was the Indo-European irrealis, used for hypothetical or contrary to fact situations. The optative mood was formed with a suffix *-ieh₁ or *-ih₁ (with a laryngeal). The optative used the clitic set of secondary personal inflections. The optative was used to express wishes or hopes.

Among the Indo-European languages, only Greek, Sanskrit, and to some extent Old Church Slavonic kept the subjunctive and optative fully separate and parallel. However, in Sanskrit, use of the subjunctive is only found in the Vedic language of earliest times, and the optative and imperative are in comparison less commonly used. In the later language (from c.500BC), the subjunctive falls out of use, with the optative or imperative being used instead. However, the first person forms of the subjunctive continue to be used, as they are transferred to the imperative, which formerly, like Greek, had no first person forms.

The Latin subjunctive is mostly made of optative forms, while some of the original subjunctive forms went to make the Latin future tense, especially in the Latin third conjugation. In Latin, the *-i- of the old optative manifests itself in the fact that the Latin subjunctives typically have a high vowel even when the indicative mood has a lower vowel; Latin rogamus, “we ask”, makes a subjunctive rogemus, “let us ask.”

In the Germanic languages, subjunctives are also usually formed from old optatives. In German, subjunctives are typically marked with an -e ending, and often with i-umlaut, showing once more the presence of the *-i- suffix that is the mark of the old optative. In Old Norse, an -i typically marks the subjunctive; grefr, “he digs”, becomes grafi, “let him dig”. While most of the signs of this suffix have been removed in Modern English, the change from was to were in the modern English subjunctive of to be also marks addition of a vowel sound to the subjunctive form, and as such represents an echo of the Indo-European optative marker of five thousand years ago.

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