Anyone learning French will at some point come across the subjunctive tense. Get round it, get through it, avoid it, but it has to be tackled somehow. It is how the French express wants, desires, needs, fears, doubts, possibilities, obligations and suchlike. What makes it difficult for English learners is that the subjunctive in English has dropped out of use, so in most cases we are not familiar with it and don’t really understand the concept. And what’s more, we don’t really give much thought to how we express the subjunctive ‘range’.

The main way that we express our hopes and fears and more besides is through modal constructions. I was alarmed to discover that there is no future tense in English: we express our future intentions through modality.

‘I will go to the cinema’ is my intention. ‘I would like to go to the cinema’ expresses my desire, ‘I must go’ expresses a necessity, ‘I ought to go’ expresses an obligation and ‘I am supposed to go’ a weaker one.  ‘I might go’ and ‘I could go’ take us into the realms of possibility. We start to enter the realm of the subjunctive when we express our wishes about others.

In English we might express a desire like this: ‘I want him to be here this evening’. The French/English subjunctive version would be ‘I want that he be here this evening’. So, in English we now use the infinitive of the verb rather than the subjunctive. However, the subjunctive nonetheless resonates with English speakers as something they might have heard, a convoluted bit of ‘legalise’ or a vague memory of rural speech.

There is one present tense subjunctive that we are really familiar with: ‘God save the queen’, which is noticeably different from the indicative statement of ‘God saves the queen’. We can see it is a subjunctive more clearly if we add in ‘We wish that’ God save the queen.

We also use adverbs and adjectives such as possibly, possible to express modality, as well as ‘it’ clauses, e.g. with the infinitive, ‘It is not possible to be in two places at once’, or the subjunctive, ‘It is important that I be in attendance at the meeting’, or would we now say, ‘It is important that I am in attendance’? I am not sure whether English or French is the more complicated.

Another concept that can take some getting used to for English learners of French is the singular and plural ‘you’. We used to have the singular ‘tu’ form in English until very recently, and it continues in the Yorkshire dialect, we have just forgotten it.

If I explain to thee, thou art sure to understand and thy comprehension be instant. Thine is the pleasure of understanding. Thou hast surely come across such formulations before.

One (as the French might say) could be fooled into thinking the ‘thee thy thou’ form came to us, along with the subjunctive, from Norman French, but no. Both features were present in Old English, and probably much further back than that. It is perhaps more interesting to ponder not where the ‘tu’ and subjunctive forms came from, but why we have lost them when many of our neighbours haven’t?