I wish I was/were there

The "were" form is often wrongly called a past subjunctive, but of course "it were done" is not a past tense of "it be done".

I wouldn't agree with this writer. Past tense forms that turn up in e.g. conditionals are the descendants of Old/Middle English past subjunctive forms.

MrP

The above post is me.

There are two reasons why some linguists call "were" in "if I were" the irrealis instead of the past subjunctive.

1
It doesn't function like the subjunctive:

I demand that it be done.

"be" here is the subjunctive. You can put any verb in the subjunctive:

I demand that it cease.

But if you substitute "were" with another verb, the simple past form is used:

I wish I were in New York.
I wish I went to New York more often.

Many sources say that "went" here is the past subjunctive. But why invent a grammatical category where none exists? "went" is identical to the simple past. It doesn't have a past tense meaning, but grammatically it is the simple past.

Now "were" in "I wish I were in New York" is not the simple past, it is a different form altogether - the irrealis. It only occurs with "be" - for all other verbs, the simple past is used instead.

2
"were" is not the past tense of "be": "it were done" is not the past tense of "it be done". In fact, there is no past subjunctive in English.

Then it would be the only verb with a past subjunctive form. And it would still not function like the subjunctive - actually maybe I should say it doesn't have the same distribution as the subjunctive.

That is, we have
I demand that it be done

but if we put this into the past tense, we don't get
*I demanded that it were done

"were" is used after "if" or "wish"
and the subjunctive is used in subordinate clauses to express necessity.

I'm not too fussed what we call it, but I think it's interesting to see how it behaves differently from the subjunctive.

MrPedantic wrote:

But isn't that simply because the mandatory subjunctive uses the present subjunctive, and not the past subjunctive?

Then where's the past subjunctive? Is there such a thing?