Two types of moods

There are two sorts of moods, and English has both:

• Verbs may be inflected for mood. Most Indo-European languages have at least vestiges of this. IIRC, Ancient Greek and Classical Sanskrit have two:
  • Subjunctive, which is used in certain clauses, often with the sense of an unreal/hypothetical statement. (Subjunctive is the traditional term in English and French grammar; it is called Konjunktiv in German and Danish.)
  • Optative, which expresses a goal or wish. In many IE languages this has been conflated with the subjunctive. (E.g., in some Latin conjugations the conjunctive is the old subjunctive, in some it is the old optative.)
• A clause or sentence may denote something other than a direct statement; the exact denotation may be expressed by adverbs, connectives, auxiliary verbs, modal verb inflections or word order. Different languages use different mechanisms to denote the same modal functions.

  Two descriptive grammars (of the same or different languages) may not agree whether a specific sort of statement/clause is a special mood, or what it is called.

The first sort of mood is a closed class; the other is infinitely (interminably) subdivisible according to the whim of the grammarian.

Trying to make a conlang with a closed class (be it inflection or particle) that expresses all possible moods of the second sort is doomed to failure: The next person to examine the list will always find a favourite mood missing.

Copyright © 1997, Don Blaheta,
Last updated: 19 Oct 1997