Re: past tense imperative

Hi!

René Uittenbogaard <ruittenb@...> writes:
>...
> >>>Had dat dan gezegd! - You should have told me so!
> >>>Was dan niet gegaan! - You shouldn't have gone!
> >>>
> >
> > What form are "had" and "was"? Subjunctives? (or whatever it's called in
> > Dutch).
>
> They are definitely not subjunctives (those would have been "ware" and
> (apparently) "hadde" (although I never came across that last form before
> I looked it up)).
>
> Instead, they are identical to the past tense singular forms of the
> indicative (where 1st, 2nd and 3rd person are identical).
Well, yes, but doesn't Modern Dutch replace the subjunctives with
indicative forms?  Like in:

   Ik had eigenlijk moeten werken, maar ik was bezig met lezen.
   I would've had to work, really, but I was busy reading.

The older forms 'ware' and 'hadde' are just not used today, I think.
Semantically, this is irrealis, no?  So 'subjunctive', maybe, if
interpreted to be expressed by an identical form as the 'indicative'
mood in Modern Dutch? :-))

> > As the Engl. translation suggests, these are more like
> > contrary-to-fact or optative sentences, IMO.
>
> Exactly.
A literal German translation would intuitively come out in subjunctive
mood.  Though the result is ungrammatically anyway...

> > things had been different in the past. Dutch uses the imperative
> > mood, ancient Greek used a past tense of the indicative mood & Latin
> > a past tense of the subjunctive mood.
>
> Cool! Thanks for pointing this out :)
I'm not really satisfied with 'imperative mood' in *contrast* to
'subjunctive mood' in Latin here, since the fictious German equivalent
would be in 'subjunctive' *and* 'imperative'.  It is not really the
same category these belong to, though the forms fuse in 'mood' in
these Germanic langs.  Just for the record, In German it'd probably be
something like:

   *Hätte das dann gemacht!

So the Dutch as I feel it, not distinguishing indicative and
subjunctive, is imperative mood, no doubt, but to contrast it with
subjunctive mood seems strange.  It feels like it *is* subjunctive to
me.  (Irrealis modality at least, I think we agreed on that.)

**Henrik