Re: Help!

John Carazzo wrote:
>Hello everyone. I am constructing my own language and seemed to
have hit a barrier: creating the conditional voice. For example,
what is "would?" Is it a future tense? What word is it a future
tense of? I am creating a subjunctive/conditional and I would
really appreciate it if anyone had advice for me, or a webpage
that could thoroughly explain this issue. Thank you so much.

First of all, the conditional is usually called a mood, not a
voice (the voices, in Indo-European languages at least, are
active, passive and middle; the moods are infinitive,
indicative, subjunctive, imperative, and I forget what else).

The English word "would" is the past tense of the verb "will",
which means (or meant, originally) "to want". English, like all
Germanic languages, truly has only two tenses, present and past
(or preterite, in the usual terminology). All the auxilliaries
which express other tenses or moods (shall, should, will, would,
may, might, can, could, etc.) are all actually the present or
past tenses of other verbs.

The native Germanic way -- or so it seems to me from what I've
read -- to express unreal or unrealized conditions, e.g. "If I
had the money I would buy it", or "Had I known he would be
there, I wouldn't have gone", is to use the past subjunctive.
However, in many Germanic languages, including English, the
subjunctive has been lost or coalesced with the indicative, so
the dictinction is no longer obvious. But if you look at e.g.
German or Old English, it's pretty obvious. :)

Other languages do other things; for example, most Romance
languages have a separate set of verbal endings for the
conditional.

Regards,

Thomas