Sometimes, what might have been never stops mattering. By Jean Chen Ho I’ve always had an unstable relationship to time. Maybe that’s because in Chinese, my first language, verbs aren’t conjugated.

What verb forms follow 'wish'? For wishes about the present or future, use the subjunctive. Follow I wish with the past subjunctive. The past subjunctive looks like the past simple, except for the ...

AT Language Log Mark Liberman notes that Nicolas Sarkozy has made headlines for, of all things, using the formal and quite rare imperfect subjunctive in a televised interview. "J'aurais aimé qu'il ...