Subjunctive: It's not indicative!

Hi everybody, and sorry for the long pause. The summer disappeared in a flurry of Aesop, but now the manuscript is safely in the hands of the editor at Bolchazy-Carducci, and she has been very encouraging about my including lots of grammar material in the book. I'll be using this blog over the next few months to expand on some of the ideas I presented in the book, providing more detail and showing how those issues connect up to a larger linguistic picture.

Gotta love the subjunctive. Today I'd like to begin what is going to be the first in what will probably turn into quite a long list of posts about the Latin subjunctive. The Latin subjunctive is a vital, expressive, extremely significant dimension of the Latin language, and the poor quality of the presentation of the Latin subjunctive is one of my biggest beefs with Latin language textbooks. The textbook by Moreland & Fleischer, Latin: An Intensive Course, earned my admiration by presenting the subjunctive very early on, in Chapter 2 of the book! Kudos to Moreland & Fleischer for doing that! In the venerable Wheelock's Latin, the subjunctive is not presented until Chapter 28 (out of 40 chapters), which I've seen do nearly irreparable damage to many people who learn Latin from that book: they remain hesitant about the subjunctive forever after.

Part of the hesitation in presenting the subjunctive derives from the fact that English, while it does have a subjunctive mood, does not rely on the subjunctive to do the same kind of work that the Latin subjunctive does. So, English is going to be of almost no help.

Subjunctive: it's not indicative. In the absence of English translations to help you, how then can you proceed? Well, structural linguistics provides a great clue: in language, the way to understand something is by recognizing what it is NOT. This principle of binary opposition or contrasts is one of the crucial insights at the heart of structural linguistics, and it provides the perfect gateway to the Latin subjunctive.

When you ask what the subjunctive is, just start by understanding that it is NOT the indicative. If the indicative gives you the statement of fact (that's a pretty easy concept to grasp, and one which is familiar to English speakers), then the subjunctive is something OTHER than that. The subjunctive covers a whole wide range of functions in Latin, but the key thing to understand about the subjunctive is just that it is NOT indicative.

Some examples. The way I'd like to illustrate that is with this little fable which will be Fable #1 in the Barlow Aesop book. You can find additional comments on the fable over at the Latin Via Fables blog; for now, I'll provide the text of the fable and then comment on the two uses of the subjunctive that you can find here:

Leaena, cum a Vulpe saepe exprobraretur quod, quolibet partu, unum dumtaxat catulum parturiret, respondit, “Unum sane, at pol Leonem!"

I'll provide a quick translation into English: "Since the fox kept on criticizing the lioness again and again because, with each litter, she gave birth to no more than one cub, the lioness replied: "One, it's true - but by god he's a lion." Notice that I'm not trying to teach you about Latin grammar with the English translation (that way danger lies!). I just want you to understand the story before we plunge into the grammar.

As you will see from my highlighting of the verbs, this little Latin story features two subjunctive verbs, and just one indicative verb. No surprise: Latin loads up on subjunctives and passives and participles and all kinds of things that are difficult for English speakers to comprehend - all the more reason to leave English behind, since it is not going to give you a lot of insight into the Latin grammar.

Let's look at the indicative verb first. It provides the core of the story, if you will: Leaena (vulpi) respondit, "The lioness replied (to the fox)." That is the central event of the story and it is appropriate told in the indicative. Everything else is just elaborating on that one, single indicative statement.

Now, for the subjunctives.

Exprobraretur. The first subjunctive, exprobraretur, is introduced by the word cum. Excellent! The word cum is a great place to start because it is a word that can introduce an indicative OR a subjunctive verb. So how does the Latin speaker choose which mood to use? The indicative tells you WHEN something happened. That's it: pure and simple. Now, the subjunctive is something different - that's the point of having a choice here. Does the subjunctive mean that something did NOT happen. No, the binary opposition is not so simple as that. This is what the Prague linguists would call a case of marked and unmarked. The indicative in Latin is marked for being a factual event; the subjunctive is not marked as factual - which is definitely not the same as being marked as unfactual, if you see what I mean.

This distinction is very relevant for exprobraretur here. Using the subjunctive does not mean that the fox did not criticize the lioness over and over again: she did! It would have been possible to use the indicative here, if the author had wanted to do so. That would have told us when the lioness made her reply. The subjunctive, however, takes out of the realm of fact and into the realm of speculation: not when, but WHY. The English word "since" gives a nice way to think about how something temporal can slip easily into the realm of the causal. Since the fox kept nagging her, the lioness finally spoke up! This would be labeled a "causal" use of the subjunctive. I'm really not interested in such labels. I just want to feel confident in my recognition that this verb is not indicative, and in my feeling for what different meaning is being conveyed in Latin through this use of the subjunctive.

Parturiret. The second subjunctive, parturiret, works in much the same way. There is nothing non-factual about this statement - the lioness really does give birth to only one cub each time she has a litter. (Well, that is not true in the biological world - but in the world of Aesop, it's as good as fact - and is essential for the punchline of the fable!) What then is the point of using the subjunctive here? What this subjunctive does is to get us into the mind of the fox. This is why the fox thinks she is justified in criticizing the lioness - why on earth does the fox think she can get away with criticizing the lioness like this? She thinks she can do that because of the lioness giving birth to one cub at a time. If the indicative were used here, we would not learn anything "behind the scenes," so to speak - no explanation of the inner logic of the story; in this instance, the inner logic of the fox's thoughts.

(A Romance digression: As someone who has always had a hard time wrapping my mind around the use of the subjunctive in modern Italian in an expression like penso che..., this is a great Latin sentence for me to keep in mind. It is exactly this kind of Latin sentence with quod - later to become Italian che - that gives me a clue about the Latin origins of the Italian use of the subjunctive.)

Conclusion. With this first post on the Latin subjunctive, I hope to have persuaded you that the first question always to ask yourself when confronting the Latin subjunctive is: could the speaker have used an indicative here? and, if so, why didn't they do that? It's always a good first question to ask, because it allows you to apply your firm knowledge of the indicative mood as a launching board in which you can then leap off into the wide open spaces of the Latin subjunctive. :-)