“If music be the food of love, play on”. Simple idea, but no so simple grammar: why “if music be ” Rather than “is” ? The short answer is that “be” here is an old fashioned use of the subjunctive mood, where we today would use the indicative “is”. A longer answer is that this simple idea has landed us in two tricky quagmires of English grammar, the subjunctive and the conditional sentence. A reader’s email dropped me in them last week, asking whether he should write “if I was” or “if I were”. Here are some guidelines to firm ground.
The conditional looks simple. “If I were a rich man… (the condition), I’d … (the result).” But it has traps. You meet a sentence like “If Mountbatten esteemed Nehru, he esteemed himself more.” This is’nt a conditional at all : the last viceroy’s self admiration did not depend on his view of Nehru. In fact, it’s a pretentious imitation of French. Shun it.
Beware of such shortened conditionals as “should I discover that …”, “were I smarter …” or “had I known…” . All these substitutes for ‘if’ are idiomatic, but all others smell a bit of the past, especially in speech. And not even poets should imitate 17th century Andrew Marvell’s plea to his mistress – “Had we put world enough, and time, this coyness, Lady were no crime” , where ‘had’ simply means “if we possessed”. Yeats did it in “Had I the heaven’s embroidered clothes”, but we lesser mortals should steer clear.
As for the subjunctive, few of us use it and often not even grammarians can tell whether it’s being used or not. That’s because in every verb except “to be”, where it substitutes “be” for the indicative “am”, “is” and “are” – the two moods are identical, except in the third person singular : in place of “I go”, “he goes”, “we/you/they go” , the subjunctive uses “I/we/he/you/they go” all the way through. A famous passage in 1611 translation of the Bible has St. Paul writing : “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels …”. Is that “speak” indicative or (more likely, in high flown English in 1611) subjunctive? No one can be sure.
Still, where the two can be told apart, should you use the subjunctive? Not in conditional sentences. “If music be the food of love” is fine for Shakespeare, but “if the bus leave on time (instead of leaves)” would sound as affected in today’s Calcutta as it is improbable.
Yet every rule has its exception, the one raised by that reader’s email. In phrases like “If I were wise” or “If I were you”, that “were” is a bit of the subjunctive. It’s bizarre : it refers to the present , not as one might expect, the past, and it always implies that the condition is unmet. But it is definitely preferable to “if he was wise” or “if I was you”.Both forms are acceptable (and with any other verb than “to be” you don’t have a choice); but “were” is better than “was”.
P.S. :- This is an excerpt taken from Telegraph, composed by Steph Hugh Jones.
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