“History does not know the subjunctive mood” [istoriya ne imeyet soslagatelnogo naclonenia] - it is believed that Stalin said this in a conversation with the German writer Emil Ludwig. However, there is nothing like that in the text of this conversation. The statement of Karl Hampe (1869-1936), a Heidelberg professor: “Die Geschichte kennt kein Wenn” - “ History does not know the word “If”, meaning historians should write what actually happened, a positivist interpretation of history. In Leon Bloy’s book “ The Soul of Napoleon ” there is a version of this thought: “ Historical events bear the imprint of the Word of God, and it does not know the conditional mood .” This was written in 1912, so most likely this is the earliest version.
The subjunctive exists to express information that is hypothetical, contrary to fact, recommended or suggested. The subjunctive is not a verb tense; it is a mood. The subjunctive mood expresses wishes, suggestions, demands, or desires in a sentence with usually two clauses. Grammatical mood can be understood as a set of forms of a verb that show what a sentence is up to—that is, whether it's making a statement, giving a command or suggestion, or expressing a wish or a possibility. English has three moods. The indicative mood is for stating facts and opinions. The imperative mood is for giving orders and instructions. The subjunctive mood is for expressing wishes, proposals, suggestions, or imagined situations. The subjunctive sometimes is applied to verbs of wishing and in contrary-to-fact conditional clauses.
Some say Vietnamese people do not — and cannot, due to a grammatical gap in their language — think about “shoulda”, “coulda”, “woulda”. But French and Spanish use the subjunctive all the time. Germanic languages have only the present tense and the past tense, but many also have a full set of subjunctive moods. The reality is that most English speakers won’t be able to tell you what the subjunctive form is. Some believe the English subjunctive is old-fashioned and has no place in modern writing. As opposed to the future, past, or present, the subjunctive is not a tense used to indicate time, rather it’s a grammatical ‘mood’. Modern English writers usually replace the subjunctive with the indicative. The form of the subjunctive has merged either with the infinitive (present subjunctive) or the past tense (past subjunctive). This is probably abetted by the near invisibility of the subjunctive; it doesn't have any distinctive forms, and often the forms it takes are identical to the forms the indicative takes in similar contexts.
It’s the verb form most closely aligned to uniquely human capacities — the capacity to wish, to recommend, to hypothesize, to dream up new ideas, to send them out into the world.
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