By Direct speech, Subjunctives

Yoong Liat wrote: The teacher said, "The world is round." In reported speech, it would be The teacher said that the world is round. One of my English usage books says it can be reported as The teacher said that the world was round. ( was consistent with said in tense) What do you think? ...

Hi, My understanding on the use of subjunctive is as crudely as it may sound is that a person is trying to write as closely as possible (as best to approximate the content) the speech rendered previously. Now, when I was looking at the us.geocities.com website for its online help on subjunctive...

As Kooyeen suggested, couldn't the original sentence be seen this way?His direct speech: "(What I think is that) my mother will understand why I am living in Japan only if she sees my life here with her own eyes."

Uh-oh! This is a difficult question! I lost a lot of time trying to understand how to use conditional sentences in reported speech, and in the end I didn't even understand completely! However, let's see if I can explain what I think: He thought his mother would understand why he was living...

Generally speaking, the report of a real conditional (indicative) and the report of an unreal conditional (subjunctive) are indistinguishable. Once the backshift is applied to report these, it is impossible to recover exactly quoted direct speech from the reported form. CJ

Even though the form of the past subjunctive is the same as the form of the simple past, you can distinguish the two by their function: 1. He went to London. 2. If he went to London, he would... The "went" in #2 has nothing to do with the past in terms of time. (Though you might say that the...

With all the wanderings of this thread, I am not sure of the question. Regarding these sentences: "i wish i could tell you what this is" (this present unidentifiable object) "i wish i could tell you what this was" (the same object) "i wish i could tell you how i feel" ...

You are right, those are not really subjunctives but... they are kinds of subjunctives! If those "was" are not past tenses, what else could they be? The meaning is like the one of the subjunctive tense. Rothkowitz wrote: do you see...my question is still unanswered Sorry, but the question...

well not really you see this is not a case of subjunctive....as i said in my first postr (cite fowler here)...there is no sequence of moods in english... therefore, for example, we do not say "if i were to say i were happy" we say, instead, "if i were to say i was happy..." you...

Also, I would say "I wish I could say he was important to me." (But he's not important to me, he did nothing for me, that ***) "I wish I could tell him he's important to me." (He's important to me, but I can't tell him that) As you see, these subjunctives are difficult to understand and...