I had a dream: Subjunctives in English and elsewhere

I’d been dreaming that I was sleeping really well.  In fact, I wasn’t sleeping well at all.

So, I laid in bed staring at the ceiling for what felt like an interminable amount of time.  Finally got up and looked at the clock: 4 AM. Before I woke up, I’d been dreaming that I was sleeping really well.  In fact, I wasn’t sleeping well at all.

Before I woke up, I’d been dreaming that I was sleeping really well.  In fact, I wasn’t sleeping well at all: English is my native language, but I’m not sure that what I just said makes sense.  It seems hopelessly unclear.  Is it the case that “in fact” I wasn’t sleeping well in the dream, or that “in fact” I wasn’t sleeping well in real life?  In fact, I wasn’t sleeping well in real life–I was just dreaming that I was.  I don’t know of a way to disambiguate that in English.  What is called for here: a language with a robust past tense of the subjunctive.

The subjunctive mood is the term that is usually given for grammatical structures that express things that are in the realm of wishes, desires, opinions, and possibilities, as opposed to things that are facts.  It just barely exists in English, and as far as I know, in English it is always optional.  To the best of my knowledge, the subjunctive only exists for the verb to be.  Here’s what it looks like, in typical American English and in the Pacific Northwest dialect.  This is a way that you can give someone advice:

  • Typical American: If I was you, I wouldn’t do that.
  • Pacific Northwest: If I were you, I wouldn’t do that.

The difference: in typical American English, you would use the past tense form for the first person singular: was.  In the Pacific Northwest, you use were.  We use was for the past tense, of course–it’s only in the subjunctive that you see this weird use of the were form.  You use it for other persons, too, in the subjunctive:

  • Typical American: If he was smarter, he wouldn’t have done that.
  • Pacific Northwest: If he were smarter, he wouldn’t have done that.

Well: English does not have a robust past subjunctive at all.  Some languages do, though.  How might I talk about my dream in one of them?  Let’s consider some options.

Modern colloquial French does not have a robust past subjunctive at all.  Literary French does, though–a leftover from earlier forms of the language, and what we would be looking at here is an ongoing action, so it would be the subjunctive imperfect that we’d be using.  (I think–again, I’m not a native speaker.)  Here’s an attempt at both of them, neither of which I speak natively, or even well:

Modern colloquial French: Je rêvais que je dormais bien, tandis que de fait je ne dormais point bien.

Literary French: Je rêvais que je dormisse bien, tandis que de fait je ne dormait point bien.

In contrast with modern colloquial French, modern colloquial Spanish does, in fact, have a robust past subjunctive.  “Robust” in the sense that people do actually use it.  Let’s try that:

Soñaba que durmiera bien, aunque de hecho no dormía nada de bien.

…aaaaaand, with that I see that in Literary French and in modern colloquial Spanish, you can express the case where in real life I wasn’t sleeping well at all, but I don’t see a good way in either language to convey the situation where it’s in the dream that I wasn’t sleeping well.  Have I fucked up all four languages (English, modern colloquial French, literary French, and modern colloquial Spanish) here?  Forgive me, ’cause it’s not even 5 AM, and I didn’t sleep well last night.

Scroll down past the video of the somewhat cute song L’Imparfait du subjonctif, “The Imperfect Subjunctive” (Pourtant je le pus et vous pûtes, hee hee hee) if you want to read the English notes.  Otherwise: go back to bed.

English notes

To disambiguate: To differentiate between two possible senses (meanings) of something (“of an utterance,” as a linguist would put it).  In computational linguistics, it usually means to find the intended sense.

  • In the French sentence L’étagère plie sous les livres (‘The shelf is bending under [the weight of] the books’), it is necessary to disambiguate the sense of livres (which can mean ‘books’ or ‘pounds’ and is masculine in the former sense, feminine in the latter) to properly tag it as a masculine noun. (Ide, Nancy, and Jean Véronis. “Introduction to the special issue on word sense disambiguation: the state of the art.” Computational Linguistics 24.1 (1998): 1-40.)
  • Lapata and Brew (1999) and others have shown that the different syntactic subcategorization frames of a verb such as serve can be used to help disambiguate a particular instance of the word. (Gildea, Daniel, and Daniel Jurafsky. “Automatic labeling of semantic roles.” Computational Linguistics 28.3 (2002): 245-288.)
  • When you search for information regarding a particular person on the web, a search engine returns many pages. Some of these pages may be for people with the same name. How can we disambiguate these different people with the same name? (Bollegala, Danushka, Yutaka Matsuo, and Mitsuru Ishizuka. “Extracting key phrases to disambiguate personal names on the web.” International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006.)

For example: I giggled about the lyrics Pourtant je le pus et vous pûtes because when spoken, it is ambiguous: it could mean either however, I could and you could (the intended sense) or however, I stink of it and you whore.  In the latter sense–which, I will note, makes no sense, and we will return to that fact momentarily–it would be written pourtant je le pue et vous pute.  So, it’s not ambiguous in writing, but it is à l’oral. 

Now: almost everything that you will say, hear, write, or read today will be ambiguous in some way.  But, humans are so good at disambiguating that we notice that ambiguity only rarely.  How do we do it?  It’s mostly mysterious, but our behavior is consistent with the notion that we calculate the set of possible meanings and select the one which is most probable.  That’s a very different thing from our normal way of thinking consciously about this, in which I might say that “I stink of it and you whore” makes no sense.  “Makes no sense” implies that there is a binary distinction–either something “makes sense,” or it doesn’t.  When you talk in terms of probabilities, then you are thinking of meanings as something that can be more or less, which is very different from being, or not.

How do computer programs do this?  Computational linguists build systems that work more or less the way that we think humans work: determine the set of possible meanings, calculate a probability for each one, and select the most-probable of the set.  What happens if there’s a tie? Well…read this paper by Antske Fokkens.

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To and fro the hanging men go

Magpies and crows have dug our eyes out // And yanked out our beards and eyebrows

I’m not typically a fan of pie charts, but this one is…special… Scroll down for some notes on what to and fro means, as well as musings about potential French equivalents.

Poetically, my latest obsession is François Villon.  Having lived in the 1300s, the details of his life are not super-clear, beyond the facts that he was semi-adopted by an influential clergyman, then well-educated, in the process doing a lot of drinking, fighting, whoring,  some theft and a bit of murder.  A couple of pardons from the gallows let him live long enough to go into exile a couple times, in the process of which he disappears from the historical record entirely at the age of 31.  In the meantime, he wrote some truly amazing poetry. If you’re anglophone, you most likely know one line from his poetry, although perhaps nothing else:

…but where are the snows of yesteryear?

On the other hand, if you’re French and you only know of one thing by him, it’s probably La ballade des pendus, “The Ballad of the Hanging Men” (my translation, sorry).

La pluie nous a débués et lavés
Et le soleil désséchés et noircis
Pies, corbeaux, nous ont les yeux cavés
Et arrachés la barbe et les sourcils
Jamais nul temps nous sommes assis
Puis ça, puis là, comme le vent varie
À son plaisir sans cesser nous charie
Plus bécquetés d’oiseaux que dés à coudre
Ne soyez donc de notre confrérie
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous veuille absoudre.

Where this becomes relevant is puis ça, puis là, comme le vent varie.  Here’s my attempt at a translation:

The rain has — and washed us
And the sun dried us out and blackened us
Magpies and crows have dug our eyes out
And yanked out our beards and eyebrows
We can never, ever sit down
To and fro, as the wind varies
Carrying us around as it likes, without end
More pecked-out by birds than thimbles
So, don’t be of our fellowship
But pray to God that he absolve all of us

WordReference.com translates to and fro as d’avant en arrière, which is OK in a literal sense, but doesn’t capture the feeling of it at all.  Then again, I can’t swear that it’s a great translation for puis ça, puis là, either.  Here and there could work (ça et là); hither and yon works, but it’s somewhat humorous, which doesn’t fit here at all.  The mysteries of translation…

I’ll leave you with my favorite reading of La ballade des pendus. It’s by one Gérald Robert, who appears to be a voice actor by profession, and/but does one fuck of a good Ballade.   Thanks for the great pie chart, LJJ, and for telling me about Villon, Phil d’Ange, and if someone can tell me what débué means, I would be very appreciative!

Coronavirus binge-watching: Into The Night

“Lapider”: to stone. Such a beautiful word for such a horrible way to kill someone.

As I write this, most of the US has been under confinement for going on two months. For me, it has been two months, ’cause I spent the week before everything went to shit isolating myself voluntarily–I was coughing like crazy, with what turned out to be whooping cough–and I didn’t want to get stoned to death on the Washington DC Metro.  (Lapider–to stone. Such a beautiful word for such a horrible way to kill someone.)

So, the other night I’m watching a new apocalyptic series on Netflix.  The crisis is not realistic, the most unrealistic of the characters is especially irritating, and…well, in general, it’s just an irritating show.  I put down my iPad in frustration, step out on the porch, and light a cigarette.

I light my cigarette, and I’m thinking about what’s going on in the real apocalypse: people dying. People’s jobs disappearing. And all of it far worse than it has to be, because the Liar-In-Chief is characterologically incapable of seeing that the way for him to handle this is not by incessantly lying through his fucking teeth, but by telling our country the truth. By putting federal dollars into testing, not by claiming that there are plenty of tests available for everyone, which is manifestly false–all while having himself and his suppôts tested daily, while front-line medical personnel go without.  Asshole.

I light my cigarette, and I’m thinking all of that, and I realize: escaping for a little while into the space of an unrealistic apocalypse would feel far better than thinking about the real one…and back into the night I go.

The unrealistic apocalyptic Netflix show to which I am now completely addicted is called Into The Night (Dans la nuit in French).  It’s in French, and in a particularly interesting French, because many of the characters are not natively francophone, so they have accents, and that fucks me up totally.  For my fellow amerloques, here’s a bit of the vocabulary that I had to look up in the first episode.

The passport control guy in the Brussels airport recognizes one of the main characters, sees that she’s flying to Moscow, and asks her:

  • Tu vas mixer ? 
    • “You spinning there?” (from the English-language subtitles, ’cause I couldn’t find mixer in the dictionary)
    • “You DJing there?” (from the British English soundtrack, ’cause see above, plus there’s no American English soundtrack)
  • Non, c’est juste une apparition.
    • No, it’s just an appearance.  (subtitles)
    • No, just publicity. (British English soundtrack, and by the way, non-Americans never believe me when I say that Americans don’t necessarily understand spoken British English, but it’s nonetheless true)

One of the characters is buying a last-minute plane ticket, and the clerk says to him:

  • Le prix s’élève à 4.235 euros.
    • The price comes to 4,235 euros.
  • Je prends.
    • I’ll take it.

s’élever à: to come to, to amount to. You use these expressions in English primarily when a price has multiple components.  So, if you buy a hamburger, and a hamburger costs $5.00, then the kid at the cash register might say: ok, that’s $5.00.  But, if you add cheese at $1.00, a slice of tomato at $0.50, and pickles at $0.50 (I have no clue what the actual prices are–who orders a hamburger at a place like that?? Not that I haven’t worked in a couple of ’em), then the clerk might say: ok, that comes to $7.00.  When do you use s’élever à in French? I have no idea–Phil d’Ange?

Here one of the characters–a Flemish dude with heavily accented French, so I don’t know how correct this is–sees people boarding the plane before him, and says the following.  What I didn’t know the meaning of was ça, alors !

  • Oh, on peut monter avant les premières classes ? Ça, alors !
    • I didn’t think anyone got to board before first class. (subtitles)
    • Looks like some people are better than first class.  You know?  Huh? Huh? (British English soundtrack)

WordReference gives a number of meanings for it, all of which are expressions of surprise.  Of them, the best translation for this case is probably well, I never! …which would typically have some connotations of a disagreeable surprise. Like, someone does something totally rude to you, or tells you a story about something shitty that someone did to them–Trump’s replacement for his original Attorney General just had the charges dropped against a guy who had already pled guilty twice of lying to the FBI about his interactions with the Russians during the transition. –Well, I never!  Of course, that conversation implies that an American exists who can still be shocked by Trump’s betrayals of America…

…and I put out my cigarette, and back to Episode 5 I go.

Conflict of interest statement: I don’t have any conflicts of interest.  I pay for my monthly Netflix subscription just like everybody else, and the tobacco industry sure as hell isn’t giving me any freebies.






English notes: idioms involving the verb to hit


to hit the books: to study.


Gotta is colloquial language for to have to.

to hit the road: to leave.





to hit the sack: to go to bed.


to hit the hay: to go to bed.








Normalcy through vocabulary. And poetry.



Notre Père qui êtes aux cieux

Our Father who art in heaven
Stay there

Et nous nous resterons sur la terre
Qui est quelquefois si jolie

And we’ll stay here on Earth
Which is sometimes so pretty

Avec ses mystères de New York
Et puis ses mystères de Paris

With its mysteries of New York
And then its mysteries of Paris




  1. It’s a disguised commode.

From the Meubliz.com web site (translations by me, sorry):





Mystères de Paris bedside toilet. Source: Meubliz.com


….sur la terre
Qui est quelquefois si jolie

…on Earth
Which is sometimes so pretty

Avec ses mystères de New York
Et puis ses mystères de Paris

With its mysteries of New York
And then its mysteries of Paris

(Yes, jolie and Paris rhyme in French.)

A Dutch-made mystères de Paris bedside toilet from 1850. Source: Meubliz.com





Mystères de Paris bedside toilet. Source: Meubliz.com

How to smile your way through the Parisian transit strike: Citymapper






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Nicot’s entry includes another meaning of the noun, which I think is a part of a suit of armor that goes on the legs. Source: https://fr.thefreedictionary.com/gr%c3%a8ve



  2. The transportation workers are striking for all of us.



The picture of an écartèlement (“drawing and quartering” in English) at the top of this page is of a bas relief from northeastern Spain. I found it at https://fr.vikidia.org/wiki/%C3%89cart%C3%A8lement.


What’s making me happy today: élucubrations









Combinatorics and pod hostels





English notes








What you do on Saturday night if you have no life whatsoever

That’s a whole lotta accents…




No, the French do not hate Americans




No, French people do not hate Americans.

L’Avenue Franklin-D.-Roosevelt, Paris. Source: Mbzt [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D

French notes
