Re: Verbal distinctions

At 03:46 PM 8/19/03 +0200, Andreas wrote:

>Same; Paraphrase with _zrón_; _ta zrón shu seno kenk_ "I
>want that he was alive" (assuming I get the English correctly - I take it to
>indicate a wish that "he" had been alive at some past point in time).
As far as getting the English correctly goes, you'll want to use the verb
"wish" here rather than "want."  (I wish I could explain the reason, beyond
just saying that "I want that" is unidiomatic.  I'm sure there's more two
it than that, but I can't grasp it myself.)

"I wish that he was alive," is a widely used (albeit slightly
ungrammatical) way of expressing a wish that the person were alive at the
present time.  The truly correct syntax is, "I wish that he were
alive."  (And if you say it this way, your grammar will be better than
about 90% of all Americans.  I'm not kidding.)  The "were" here in place
of  the ususal "was" is the subjunctive mood in English and is used to
indicate a contrary-to-fact condition.

If you want to express that you currently desire that someone had been
alive at some previous time, you use the past perfect subjunctive (and the
subjunctive in the past perfect doesn't happen to look any different than a
past perfect would look in the indicative.)  You would say, "I wish that he
had been alive."

And if you say, "I wished that he had been alive," you have expressed that
you wished at some time in the past that someone had been alive at that
time (but he wasn't.)

"I wished that he were alive," expresses much the same idea as the previous
example.

O hope I haven't been too confusing.  I also hope that I haven't been
offensive by correcting your English.  These are truly very difficult
constructions (which native English speakers don't always get right), and I
am really glad that I am no longer required to construct similar sentences
in Latin; that was always something of a headache.

Isidora

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