"If you knew what I had gone through, you would surely pity me." Don't listen to these people. You can change it to "have" because only the first verb has to be in the subjunctive mood. The verb "knew" is

Now if I look up "are," the dictionary tells me that it is the present plural of "be." But what I would expect is that it would tell me that it is the present plural of "am" or "is" because those are the

Hi p0101 and welcome to English Forums. "Were" is the past tense of "are." I am I was You are You were He is He was We are We were They are They were Sometimes we use something called the subjunctive. Usually

You merely need to explain that earlier indicative and subjunctive forms were superseded by the modern past tense forms. It should take 30 seconds or so. (The apparent anomaly is not unique to English, by the way. For instance, French

Works is a present tense verb form which refers to this moment or indicates a truth that always applies. The present infinitive to work is used because of that. Left is a past tense form and consequently an infinitive that refers to the past must

Welcome to the Forums! The subjunctive mood follows the verb "wish". Subjunctive is rather rare in English, and has been decreasing, but it is still used in a few cases like this one. Here are some examples in present tense: I wish he

Yet if she could have seen me there, she would have been a little puzzled. What verb form is "could have seen" in this sentence? Personally, I would just call it a "modal perfect" (with could ). I use that term for any modal

I found a website that could help you. I'll quote part of it for you: "May/might is an example of a modal auxiliary verb. The distinction between may and might has to do with the tense (present, past etc.) and/ or mood (indicative/

Example 1 I was wondering if I send the original s document s , how long will it take before I get them back. I was wondering if I sent the origina l s document s , how long will it take before I get them back. Example 2 The Original Documents

The first sentence seems like a kind of stream of consciousness to me. This technique is employed by some writers. I get this impression because from a strictly grammatical viewpoint, the sentence is ungrammatical in that there is a comma between