Verbs and syntax V: indicative and subjunctive moods

• Mood is undoubtedly the vaguest and least intuitive element of Latin verb-endings. The different alternatives under this heading don't relate to one another in the kind of interlocking ways that the items in the other four columns do. Rather, they're alternative branches of the verb to which some but not all of the other items apply.
  

• I've actually included in this column in square brackets a couple of things that aren't strictly speaking moods of the verb in the traditional sense, but which it makes sense to think of as inhabiting the same grammatical compartment: participles, of which more later, and gerunds and gerundives. The last are in italics because we don't get on to them this year; similarly with the imperative, which is a real mood of the verb and probably the easiest of the lot, but doesn't fall within this year's Units. That leaves us with the indicative, subjunctive, and infinitive, which I'll deal with in turn.

• INDICATIVES
  • Everything we've seen so far is indicative. The indicative is the mood of the verb that deals with straightforward statements of fact: "I love you." "You will love the fried sheep's brains they serve here." "He had loved that dog before it bit him." The main verb of a sentence is always in the indicative, unless it's one of the exceptions we don't get on to this year; this is important when you're trying to unscramble complex sentences, as we'll be trying to do a bit later. The indicative is also the only mood of the verb that has a full complement of tenses, as we'll see in a moment.

• SUBJUNCTIVES
  • Subjunctives, on the other hand, are what you use for all those kinds of expression that aren't simple statements of fact: all the woulds and shoulds and coulds and mays and mights that treat the proposition as a bit iffy.
    

  • Only four of the six tenses have a subjunctive; the future tenses, the future and future perfect, don't have subjunctives at all.
    
    • The present subjunctive goes like the present of amo, except that (i) the first person singular is -am rather than -o; (ii) amo itself has an e instead of the a so it doesn't look like the present indicative. To make the passive, you just substitute the passive red endings for the active ones - remember this red part of the ending gives you voice as well as person and number.

    • The imperfect subjunctive simply sticks the standard person-and-number endings (-m, -s, -t, -mus, -tis, -nt) on the present infinitive.

    • The perfect subjunctive active goes like the future perfect indicative, except that the first person singular is the more regular -erim rather than -ero. Also, the i is long in the second person (sing. & pl.) and the first person plural, but in practice you don't need to remember this.

    • The pluperfect subjunctive active is formed in a similar way to the imperfect subjunctive. This time you take the perfect infinitive (amavisse, monuisse, rexisse, audivisse), and add the usual -m, -s, -t, -mus, -tis, -nt endings.
      

    • The perfect and pluperfect subjunctives passive are formed in the same way as the indicatives - they're compound tenses made up of the perfect participle and the verb to be, except that this time you use the equivalent subjunctive tenses of sum: present to form the perfect, imperfect to form the pluperfect.

  • The single most often-asked question about the subjunctive is "how do you translate it?" The book's wussy answer is that you translate it differently for each construction you meet it in, which is fair enough as far as it goes but doesn't get you very far. The easy answer is that for the purposes of this year you translate the present subjunctive in purpose clauses only as "may", the imperfect subjunctive in purpose clauses only as "might", and all other subjunctives you may encounter you just translate with the English indicative. In the next section, we'll look at this in more detail.