Writing in an online forum for learners of English (usingenglish.com) earlier this week I asserted "the subjunctive is much less common in British English than in American English". I was supported by people whose views I have learned to be sound, but I still felt that an assertion like that needed some quantitative support.
As usual my first port of call was the British National Corpus. The search string I used was that there be – a fairly crude choice, but an unquestionable one. The BNC is a 100 million word corpus, and in all that text (mostly written...
<parenthesis>
BNC has 90% writtten sources, and only 10% spoken. But my guess is that the subjunctive is more common in formal writing rather than in speech. This search in the (very much bigger) Hansard corpus supports this preference:
</parenthesis>....) it found only 69 instances:
There are various ways of making up for this uncommonness, but probably the most popular is the interpolation of 'should' – which yields nearly 8 times as many hits:
That's the picture for British English. The Corpus of Contemporary American English is much bigger than BNC – 10 times the size, and more recently updated – but the figure is impressive:
So speakers of American English use the subjunctive more readily than speakers of British English, and use an interpolated 'should' to avoid it much less often.
Translation News
Winners of the Stephen Spender Translation Prize 2023 have been decided and will be announced next Thursday. Winners have already been notified, but my letter seems to have been lost in the post. I shan't be attending the online announcement shindig next week, not because I'm washing my hair but because it's the first rehearsal with my choir's new MD. (Our old MD's swansong is tomorrow, and there are still tickets:
To judge from lasr night's rehearsal it'll be well worth a visit.)
Right, I know the notes; now it's just the words (and where to put them) ...
b
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