If were were a has-been

The Süddeutsche Zeitung is Bavaria’s heavyweight daily.  Its design is dour and its tone serious.  As befits such an institution, it is scrupulous in its writing; in particular, it flags constantly the fact that its news is based on others’ reports, claims and comments.  To convey this it is able to avoid the British newspapers’ clumsy and intrusive markers “it is reported” and “it is claimed” by employing the mood of indirect speech, resulting in a perpetual subjunctive: “the Government be under great pressure.”  The effect is curious: it is as if the Süddeutsche Zeitung were unable to vouch for the ultimate reality of the world it reports, and so presents even the most trivial statement in inverted commas.  As a result, the whole newspaper takes on a kind of shimmering insubstantiality.

Of all the modern European languages German is among the most atavistic in its adherence to the old laws of mood, and therefore comes across as somewhat pedantic and pompous to other laxer language groups.  But in ancient tongues like Classical Greek, the use of moods like the subjunctive and optative – used for expressing wishes – was abundant; these were not fancy embellishments wheeled out to impress, but reflected a keen appreciation of the nuances of reality.

Indeed, in their subtle distinctions between different states of the world there remains something of the pristine ontology the first words must have expressed.  Just as initially it must have seemed impossible to state an untruth with words – since words were a transcription of things, the true names of objects – so the necessity of distinguishing between different modes of existence – the certain indicative, the dubious subjunctive, the desired optative – would have seemed an inescapable consequence of language’s function of precisely describing the world.

Inevitably with time that exactitude has been lost.  First the living interplay of moods became just rules, and then like all rules they were broken and gradually eroded.  English is one of the most worn of languages: centuries of commingling with other races – the Celts, the Vikings, the Normans – has worn away most of the knotty details of declensions and conjugations.  Along with them has gone nearly all of Anglo-Saxon’s Germanic heritage of mood variations.

Today the subjunctive is seriously endangered.  With the globalisation of English, the last snagging spurs are being broken off in the interests of ease of learning and use.  To bemoan this loss is not mere sentimentality; without the subjunctive we would lose small but real subtleties.  Take, for example, the phrases “if I were in your shoes” and “if I was in your shoes”.  The former considers an impossible situation, since I have no intention of wearing your shoes which do not in any case fit.  The latter considers those occasions in the past when I borrowed your shoes and had experiences in them that I now recall.  The instances could be multiplied endlessly.  If the subjunctive word “were” and all its relatives were to disappear, we would be certainly impoverished.  We would literally be unable to say certain things, to make certain distinctions.  What we cannot say, we cannot think.  Help keep “were” alive: let it not be a has-been.

(20.12.89)

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