[lojban] Re: Japanese has no subjunctive??

[And Rosta <arosta@uclan.ac.uk>]

>    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.