Looking at Latin Anna Andresian p 226 treats Hortatory, Jussive and Volitive subjunctive on one page, as virtually the same thing. I think this makes it much easier. The context (and form) help you decide whether to translate as "let.. Let us… Be…
Yes it’s all a bit blurry, and different grammars classify in different ways. “Hortatory” may best be reserved for 1st-person plural as in “Let’s go,” and “jussive” for actual imperatives as in “Go home.” But the terms and their application are elastic, and form and function tend to be confused.
Greek has a wider range of constructions, thanks to the optative (with and without ἄν), lost to Latin.
I teach them all as just Jussive also. I can’t remember specific books, but a number of grammar books do this, and it’s just easier on students. I throw in the deliberative too (see the link), but they will never know it’s called the deliberative unless they read a footnote in their handouts. For them, it’s a Jussive Question.
I don’t much care for the notion of a “jussive question.” It seems like a contradiction in terms. (I suppose “Won’t you shut up?” should qualify, though.) And it’s ridiculous to say “you can tell it is a jussive question if the answer is a command.” What if the answer is not a command? And anyway the response is determined by context, not by grammar.
The dismissal of “deliberative subjunctive” as a syntactical category, on the other hand, seems to me unfounded. And to say “the indicative is almost as common as the subjunctive” is absurd.
I don’t know who was responsible for that OSU site, but it’s in dire need of overhaul.
The author was William Batstone, according to Anna Chahoud (Trinity College, Dublin), who, quoting this article, says “He has a point” (Early and Late Latin, Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 222).
Well, they’re both reputable latinists, but the fact remains that as it stands that page is a mess. The difference between subjunctive and indicative in deliberative questions is precisely a grammatical one.
I can’t say I totally understood the article’s point about categories, but to me (at least), the difference between “I should go to Rome” and “should I go to Rome?” is a question mark, and so I place them both under the category of Jussive (following the suggestion of the article).
The site seems to treat the subjunctive is a useful and logical manner, treating the subordinate uses under the headings of the original independent use from which they emerged. Certainly seems a better way of organizing the material. But each to their own.
duplicated by mistake (this site keeps logging me out whenever I try posting or editing).
I agree it makes sense both in logical and in historical terms to treat the independent uses of the subjunctive before the dependent ones, but what sense does it make to treat “I should go to Rome” as jussive? There’s no command involved, no hint of an imperative, merely a weak acknowledgment of obligation, in the form of a simple statement. Latin has various ways of conveying obligation, of saying “ought” (gerundive, debeo, oportet), all of them quite distinct from giving an order (iubeo, jussive). Latin is confusing enough without making it more so.
Well, actually, since the pertinency of the label jussive is being called into question, I would say that I don’t actually disagree with you on that. I was just using the label that is commonly used. I call what is known as the volitive or jussive the “subjunctive of obligation” instead, emboldened somewhat by Pinkster’s labelling of it the Deontic.
In fact, a number of grammarians seem to speak of the volitive in terms of obligation instead, and to include the “let us” and “should” translations under this.
E.g., Woodcock, under the heading of the hortatory subjunctive, quotes Plautus’ “sed maneam, opinor” and translates it with, “But I must wait, I think” (A New Latin Syntax, 85).
Also David Chistenson (https://christed.faculty.arizona.edu/latin112/subjunctiveII.pdf): “The Jussive subjunctive expresses what the speaker or writer believes should be done”. He lists the hortatory use under Jussive (though again, maybe the label of the category is the issue, not the category itself).
Sonnenschein (okay, he’s an oldie and things have probably moved on since then, but his work on the subjunctive was noteworthy) categorized it as a subjunctive “denoting what is to be done” (A New Latin Grammar, 148).
Coderch though seems to insist on the jussive idea, describing the hortatory subjunctive as speaking of “orders that we give ourselves.” Yeah, not sure I could agree with that.
It would be nice to have some settled opinions on these things from the experts, though I understand that the nature of the difficulties precludes this.
The other two categories I use are subjunctive of wish (optative), and “potential” (though similarly, I incline toward the “conditional futurity” view and only teach would/would have as the translations, rather than “may,” “might,” not because I’m necessarily convinced of this view, but because it simplifies the concepts and thus is easier to organize teaching around, and it may well be correct (from my perspective, at least).
I’m not sure we’re making progress here, beyond rehearsing doxographies. But the “subjunctive of wish” and the “potential” subjunctive are certainly real and discrete categories, corresponding as they do to the Greek optative and the Greek opt.+ἄν respectively—both unavailable to Latin.
I can happily accept PInkster’s”deontic” for the bundle of must-ought expressions I listed (cf. Gk. δεῖ). But to call them “jussive” is misleading and just plain wrong.
suit yourself.
Seeing this, I remembered that the site has been undergoing high load lately, and (deliberatively) asked myself, “Should I fix the slowness this morning?” It meant upgrading the virtual machine CPU and memory, and I (jussively) followed on with, “Shouldn’t I just pay the extra $10/mo. for a snappier site?”
And now that the site is easy to use again, maybe we can all stop channeling our irritation into our posts? (Hortatory or jussive depends on my momentary mental state as I wrote the last…but I’m actually just funning, so really only volitive.)
ok