| >But you were originally stating that subjunctive in French lost its semantic value. Now you making it narrow and added "compared to Spanish". I said almost lost, and I'm choosing to believe out of charity that you didn't notice the extra word. > But you were originally stating that subjunctive in French lost its semantic value. Now you making it narrow and added "compared to Spanish". Yes, that's the crux of my argument, comparing use cases in French with that of other Romance languages in order to show how far the subjunctive use cases in French drifted from their original purpose and meaning. How else am I supposed to demonstrate it without a couple of reference points to compare with? > It was meant to say that misuse of tenses and moods may alter causality and in general events chaining is not commutative (poop o wipe != wipe o poop). I did take your point a little too literally, sorry. Still, the fact that mood and tense use across Romance languages is inconsistent, yet: -People who speak either Romance language have no trouble distinguishing the actual from the hypothetical within their language, and -People who speak multiple Romance languages have no trouble switching from one mood to the other according to the use case/language combination at hand, shows how unlikely your "poop o wipe" situations are in practice. People "misuse" tenses and moods all the time (which is the prescriptive way of saying tense and mood usage evolves all the time) yet they still manage to communicate clearly somehow. This shows that these are not actually central to convey meaning and there are other avenues that do not use this system (context, adverbial cues, etc.). >I said you can do it in any language, but the formulation at some point will become cumbersome. Do you have any evidence for this? Like, can you showcase foreign languages that do not feature this system and whose formulation of the hypothetical would prove consistently more cumbersome and verbose than that of Romance languages? I'm not sure if you realize how far-reaching that statement is. |