From arosta@uclan.ac.uk Tue Sep 30 06:07:02 2003 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-list); Tue, 30 Sep 2003 06:07:03 -0700 (PDT) Received: from com1.uclan.ac.uk ([193.61.255.3]) by digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.12) id 1A4KDE-0000jA-00 for lojban-list@lojban.org; Tue, 30 Sep 2003 06:06:44 -0700 Received: from gwise-gw1.uclan.ac.uk by com1.uclan.ac.uk with SMTP (Mailer) with ESMTP; Tue, 30 Sep 2003 14:04:27 +0100 Received: from DI1-MTA by gwise-gw1.uclan.ac.uk with Novell_GroupWise; Tue, 30 Sep 2003 14:12:30 +0100 Message-Id: X-Mailer: Novell GroupWise Internet Agent 6.0.2 Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 14:12:02 +0100 From: And Rosta To: lojban-list Subject: [lojban] Re: Japanese has no subjunctive?? Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Disposition: inline X-archive-position: 6321 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: arosta@uclan.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-list@lojban.org X-list: lojban-list > My wife reports that subjunctive grammar, e.g. if I had studied, > I would have done better on the test, are very difficult, since > none of this grammar is found in Japanese. > If this is true, and I find it unlikely, how do the Japanese talk > about subjunctives? Or do they simply (and I find this > unimaginable) not do so? 'Subjunctive' is a grammatical category (a mood), so ordinary Japansese wdn't talk about subjunctives. But it's not hard to believe that "If I had studied harder I would have done better" is difficult to translate, since the construction encodes the complex meaning "In all world in which I study harder, I do better; but the present world is not one in which I study harder". --And.